LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



AN 



OUTLINE SKETCH 



OF 



AMERICAN LITERATURE, 



BY 



HENRY A. BEERS, 

// 

Frofcssor of English in Yale College. 

Author of "An Outline Sketch of English Literature," "A 

Century of American Literature," "■ Life of N. P. 

Willis," "The Th/^nkless JNIuse," etc. 




NEW YORK: 

CHAUTAUQUA PRESS, 

C. L. S. C. Department, 

805 Broadway. 
1887. 



The required books of the C. L S. C. are reeom- 
mended by a Council of six. It must, however, be 
understood that reoemmendation does not involve 
an approval by the Council, or by any member of 
it, of every principle or doctrine contained in the 
book recommended. 



Copyright 1887, by Phillips & Hunt, 805 Broadway, New York. 






u 



PREFACE 



This little volume is intended as a com- 
panion to the Outline Sketch of English Lit- 
erature^ published last year for the Chautau- 
qua Circle. In writing it I have followed the 
same plan, aiming to present the subject in a 
sort of continuous essay rather than in the 
form of a "■ primer" or elementary manual. I 
have not undertaken to describe or even to 
mention every American author or book of 
importance, but only those which seemed to 
me of most significance. Nevertheless I be- 
lieve that the sketch contains enough detail 
to make it of some use as a guide-book to our 
literature. Though meant to be mainly a his- 
tory of American belles-lettres it makes some 
mention of historical and political writings, 



4 * Preface. 

but hardly any of philosophical, scientific, and 
technical works. 

A chronological rather than a topical order 
has been followed, although the fact that our 
best literature is of recent growth has made it 
impossible to adhere as closely to a chrono- 
logical plan as in the English sketch. In the 
reading courses appended to the different 
chapters I have named a few of the most im- 
portant authorities in American literary his- 
tory, such as Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and 

Richardson, 

Henry A. Beers. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Colonial Period, 1607-1765 • 7 

II. The Revolutionary Period, 1765-1S15 51 

III. The Era of National Expansion, 1815-1S37. 86 

^y. The Concord Writers, 1837-1S61 120 

V. The Cambridge Scholars, 1837-1861 158 

VI. Literature in the Cities, 1837-1861 197 

VII. Literature Since 1S61 240 

Index 280 



OUTLINE SKETCH 



OF 



AMERICAN LITERATURE. 



CHAPTER I. 
THE COLONIAL PERIOD. 

1607-1765. 

The writings of our colonial era have a much 
greater importance as history than as literature. 
It would be unfair to judge of the intellectual 
vigor of the English colonists in America by the 
books that they wrote; those " stern men with em- 
pires in their brains " had more pressing work to 
do than the making of books. The first settlers, 
indeed, were brought face to face with strange 
and exciting conditions — the sea, the wilderness, 
the Indians, the flora and fauna of a new world — 
things which seem stimulating to the imagination, 
and incidents and experiences which might have 
lent themselves easily to poetry or romance. Of 
all these they wrote back to England reports which 
were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon 
the whole, hardly rise into the region of literature. 
" New England," said Hawthorne, *' was then in a 



8 American Literature. 

state incomparably more picturesque than at pres- 
ent." But to a contemporary that old New En- 
gland of the seventeenth century doubtless seemed 
any thing but picturesque, filled with grim, hard, 
worky-day realities. The planters both of Virginia 
and Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and 
starvation, constantly threatened«by Indian wars, 
and troubled by quarrels among themselves and 
fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles 
between the royal governors and the House of 
Burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the theolog- 
ical squabbles in New England, which fill our 
colonial records, are petty and wearisome to read 
of. At least, they would be so did we not bear in 
mind to what imperial destinies these conflicts 
were slowly educating the little communities which 
had hardly as yet secured a foothold on the edge 
of the raw continent. 

Even a century and a half after the Jamestown 
and Plymouth settlements, when the American 
plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and 
commerce was building up large towns, and there 
were wealth and generous living and fine society, 
the " good old colony days when we lived under 
the king," had yielded little in the way of litera- 
ture that is of any permanent interest. There 
would seem to be something in the relation of a 
colony to the mother country which dooms the 
thought and art of the former to a hopeless pro- 
vincialism. Canada and Australia are great prov- 
inces, wealthier and more populous than the thir- 



The Colonial Period. 9 

teen colonies at the time of their separation from 
England. They have cilies whose inhabitants 
number hundreds of thousands, well equipped 
universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public 
buildings, all the outward appliances of an ad- 
vanced civiUzation; and yet what have Canada 
and Australia contributed to British literature ? 

American literature had no infancy. That en- 
gaging naivete and that heroic rudeness which give 
a charm to the early popular tales and songs of 
Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. 
Instead of emerging from the twilight of the past, 
the first American writings were produced under 
the garish noon of a modern and learned age. 
Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark 
of a colonial literature. The poets, in particular, 
instead of finding a challenge to their imagination 
in the new life about them, are apt to go on imi- 
tating the cast off literary fashions of the mother 
country. America was settled by Englishmen who 
were contemporary with the greatest names in En- 
glish literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607, 
nine years before Shakspeare's death, and the hero 
of that enterprize. Captain John Smith, may not 
improbably have been a personal acquaintance of 
the great dramatist. " They have acted my fatal 
tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many cir- 
cumstances in The Tempest were doubtless sug- 
gested by the wreck of the Sea Venture on " the 
still vext Bermoothes," as described by William 
Strachey in his True Reportory of the Wrack and 



10 American Literature. 

Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, written at James- 
town, and published at London in 15 lo. Shak- 
spere's contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet 
of the Polyolbion, addressed a spirited valedictory 
ode to the three shiploads of " brave, heroic 
minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to col- 
onize Virginia ; an ode which endSd with the 
prophecy of a future American literature: 

" And as there plenty grows ■ 

Of laurel every-where, — 

Apollo's sacred tree — 

You it may see 

A poet's brows 

To crown, that may sing there." 

Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author 
of the Civil Wars, had also prophesied in a similar 
strain: 

" And who in time knows whither we may vent 

The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores . . . 

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 
May come refined with accents that are ours." 

It needed but a slight movement in the balances 
of fate, and Walter Raleigh might have been reck- 
oned among the poets of iVmerica. He was one 
of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, 
and he made voyages in person to Newfoundland 
and Guiana. And more unlikely things have hap- 
pened than that when John Milton left Cambridge 
in 1632, he should have been tempted to follow 
Winthrop and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, 



The Colonial Period. ii 

who had sailed two years before. Sir Henry Vane, 
the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend — 

" Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old" — 

came over in 1635, and was for a short time Gov- 
ernor of Massachusetts. These are idle specula- 
tions, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver Crom- 
well was on the point of embarking for America 
when he was prevented by the king's officers, we 
may, for the nonce, " let our frail thoughts dally 
with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a 
chance Paradise Lost missed being written in Bos- 
ton. But, as a rule, the members of the literary 
guild are not quick to emigrate. They like the 
feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, 
a state of society which America has only begun 
to reach during the present century. 

Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were 
the " two great distributing centers of the English 
race." The men who colonized the country be- 
tween the Capes of Virginia w^ere not drawn, to 
any large extent, from the literary or bookish 
classes in the Old Country. Many of the first 
settlers were gentlemen — too many, Captain Smith 
thought, for the good of the plantation. Some 
among these were men of worth and spirit, " of 
good means and great parentage." Such was, for 
example, George Percy, a younger brother of the 
Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the orig- 
inal adventurers, and the author of A Discoiuse of 
the Plantation of the Southern Colony of Virginia^ 



12 American Literature. 

which contains a graphic narrative of the fever 
and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But 
many of these gentlemen were idlers, " unruly gal- 
lants, packed thither by their friends to escape ill 
destinies;" dissipated younger sons, soldiers of 
fortune, who came over after the gold which was 
supposed to abound in the new country, and who 
spent their time in playing bowls and drinking at 
the tavern as soon as there was any tavern. With 
these was a sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, 
indented servants, and the off-scourings of the 
London streets, fruit of press gangs and jail deliv- 
eries, sent over to " work in the plantations." 

Nor were the conditions of life afterward in 
Virginia very favorable to literary growth. The 
planters lived isolated on great estates, which had 
water fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesa- 
peake. There the tobacco, the chief staple of the 
country, was loaded directly upon the trading ves- 
sels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the 
plantations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited 
occasionally by a distant neighbor, the Virginia 
country gentleman lived a free and careless life. 
He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and 
cock-fighting. There were no large towns, and 
the planters met each other mainly on occasion of 
a county court or the assembling of the Burgesses. 
The court-house was the nucleus of social and po- 
litical life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in 
New England. In such a state of society schools 
were necessarily few, and popular education did 



The Colonial Period. 13 

not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the 
royal governor of the colony from 1641 to 1677, 
said, in 1670, " I thank God there are no free 
schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have 
these hundred years." In the matter of printing, 
this pious wish was well-nigh realized. The first 
press set up in the colony, about 1681, was soon 
suppressed, and found no successor until the year 
1729. From that date until some ten years before 
the Revolution one printing-press answered the 
needs of Virginia, and this was under official con- 
trol. The earliest newspaper in the colony was the 
Vin-inia Gazette, established in 1736. 

In the absence of schools the higher education 
naturally languished. Some of the planters were 
taught at home by tutors, and others went to En- 
gland and entered the universities. But these were 
few in number, and there was no college in the 
colony until more than half a century after the 
foundation of Harvard in the younger province of 
Massachusetts. The college of William and Mary 
was established at Williamsburg chiefly by the ex- 
ertions of the Rev. James Blair, a Scotch divine, 
who was sent by the Bishop of London as " com- 
missary " to the Church in Virginia. The college 
received its charter in 1693, and held its first-com- 
mencement in 1700. It is perhaps significant of 
the difference between the Puritans of New En- 
gland and the so-called " Cavaliers " of Virginia, 
that while the former founded and supported 
Harvard College in 1636, and Yale in 1701, of 



14 American Literature. 

their own motion, and at their own expense, Will- 
iam and Mary received its endowment from the 
crown, being provided for in part by a deed of 
lands and in part by a tax of a penny a pound on 
all tobacco exported from the colony. In return 
for this royal grant the college was to present 
yearly to the king two copies of Latin verse. It 
is reported of the young Virginian gentlemen who 
resorted to the new college that they brought their 
plantation manners with them, and were accus- 
tomed to " keep race-horses at the college, and 
bet at the billiard or other gaming tables." Will- 
iam and Mary College did a good work for the 
colony, and educated some of the great Virginians 
of the Revolutionary era, but it has never been 
a large or flourishing institution, and has held no 
such relation to the intellectual development of its 
sectior^ as Harvard and Yale have held in the col- 
onies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even 
after the foundation of the University of Virginia, 
in which Jefferson took a conspicuous part, south- 
ern-youths were commonly sent to the North for 
their education, and at the time of the outbreak of 
the civil war there was a large contingent of south- 
ern students in several northern colleges, notably 
'in Princeton and Yale. 

Naturally, the first books written in America 
were descriptions of the country and narratives of 
the vicissitudes of the infant settlements, which 
were sent home to be printed for the information 
of the English public and the encouragement of 



The Colonial Period. 15 

further immigration. Among books of this kind 
produced in Virginia the earliest and most note- 
worthy were the writings of that famous soldier of 
fortune, Captain John Smith. The first of these 
was his True Relation^ namely, ''of such occur- 
rences and accidents of note as hath happened in 
Virginia since the first planting of that colony," 
printed at London in 1608, Among Smith's other 
books, the most important is perhaps his General 
History of Virginia (London, 1624), a compilation 
of various narratives by different hands, but pass- 
ing under his name. Smith was a man of a rest- 
less and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of 
contradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious na- 
ture, with an appetite for the marvelous and a dis- 
position to draw the long bow. He had seen 
service in many parts of the world, and his won- 
derful adventures lost nothing in the telling. It 
was alleged against him that the evidence of his 
prowess rested almost entirely on his own testi- 
mony. His truthfulness in essentials has not, per- 
haps, been successfully impugned, but his narra- 
tives have suffered by the embellishments with 
which he has colored them, and, in particular, the 
charming story of Pocohontas saving his life at 
the risk of her own — the one romance of early 
Virginian history — has passed into the realm of 
legend. 

Captain Smith's writings have small literary 
value apart from the interest of the events which 
they describe, and the diverting but forcible per- 



i6 American Literature. 

sonality which they unconsciously display. They 
are the rough-hewn records of a busy man of ac- 
tion, whose sword was mightier than his pen. As 
Smith returned to England after two years in Vir- 
ginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with 
the settlement of which he had been for a time the 
leading spirit, he can hardly be claimed as an 
American author. No more can Mr. George San- 
dys, who came to Virginia in the train of Governor 
Wyat, in 1621, and completed his excellent metri- 
cal translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, 
in the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, 
" limned " as he writes " by that imperfect light 
which was snatched from the hours of night and 
repose, having wars and tumults to bring it to 
light instead of the muses." Sandys went back 
to England for good, probably as early as 1625, 
and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the 
first American poet, on the strength of his para- 
phrase of the Metamorphoses, than he can be reck- 
oned the earliest Yankee inventor, because he " in- 
troduced the first water-mill into America." 

The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the 
southern colonies which took their point of depar- 
ture from Virginia, is almost wholly of this his- 
torical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is 
concerned with the internal affairs of the province, 
such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in 1676, one of the 
most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary 
annals, and of which there exist a number of nar- 
ratives, some of them anonymous, and only rescued 



The Colonial Period. 17 

from a manuscript condition a hundred years after 
the event. Another part is concerned with the 
explorations of new territory. Such were the 
" Westover Manuscripts," left by Colonel William 
Byrd, who was appointed in 1729 one of the com- 
missioners to fix the boundary between Virginia 
and North Carolina, and gave an account of the 
survey in his History of the Dividing Line, which 
was only printed in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one 
of the most brilliant figures of colonial Virginia, 
and a type of the Old Virginia gentleman. He 
had been sent to England for his education, where 
he was admitted to the bar of the Middle Temple, 
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and formed 
an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl 
of Orrery. He held many offices in the govern- 
ment of the colony, and founded the cities of 
Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were 
large, and at Westover — where he had one of the 
finest private libraries in America — he exercised a 
baronial hospitality, blending the usual profusion 
of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled 
scholar and " picked man of countries." Colonel 
Byrd was rather an amateur in literature. His 
History of the Dividing Line is written with a jocu- 
larity which rises occasionally into real humor, and 
which gives to the painful journey through the 
wilderness the air of a holiday expedition. Sim- 
ilar in tone were his diaries of A Progress to the 
Mines and A Journey to the Land of Eden in North 
Carolina. 
2 



i8 American Literature. 

The first formal historian of Virginia was Rob- 
ert Berkeley, '" a native and inhabitant of the 
place," whose History of Virginia was printed at 
London in 1705. Beverley was a rich planter and 
large slave owner, who, being in London in 1703, 
was shown by his bookseller the manuscript of a 
forthcoming work, Oldmixon's British Empire in 
America. Beverley was set upon writing his his- 
tory by the inaccuracies in this, and likewise because 
the province "has been so misrepresented to the 
common people of England as to make them be- 
lieve that the servants in Virginia are made to 
draw in cart and plow, and that the country turns 
all people black," an impression which lingers still 
in parts of Europe. The most original portions 
of the book are those in which the author puts 
down his personal observations of the plants and 
animals of the New World, and particularly the 
account of the Indians, to which his third book is 
devoted, and which is accompanied by valuable 
plates. Beverley's knowledge of these matters 
was evidently at first hand, and his descriptions 
here are very fresh and interesting. The more 
strictly historical part of his work is not free from 
prejudice and inaccuracy. A more critical, de- 
tailed, and impartial, but much less readable, work 
was William Stith's History of the First Discovery 
and Settle f77ent of Virginia^ i747, which brought 
the subject down only to the year 1624. Stith 
was a clergyman, and at one time a professor in 
William and Mary College. 



The Colonial Period. 19 

The Virginians were stanch royalists and church- 
men. The Church of England was established by 
law, and non-conformity was persecuted in various 
ways. Three missionaries were sent to the colony 
in 1642 by the Puritans of New England, two from 
Braintree, Massachusetts, and one from New Haven. 
They were not suffered to preach, but many re- 
sorted to them in private houses, until, being finally 
driven out by fines and imprisonments, they took 
refuge in Catholic Maryland. The Virginia clergy 
wxre not^ as a body, very much of a force in edu- 
cation or literature. Many of them, by reason of 
the scattering and dispersed condition of their 
parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the 
wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy 
and their passion for gaming and hunting. Few 
of them inherited the zeal of Alexander Whit- 
aker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 
161 1 to preach to the colonists and convert the 
Indians, and who published in furtherance of those 
ends Good News from Virginia^ in 16 13, three 
years before his death by drowning in James 
River. 

The conditions were much more favorable for 
the production of a literature in New England 
than in the southern colonies. The free and ge- 
nial existence of the " Old Dominion " had no 
counterpart among the settlers of Plymouth and 
Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have 
been rather unpleasant people to live with for per- 
sons of a different way of thinking. But their in- 



20 American Literature. 

tensity of character, their respect for learning, and 
the heroic mood which sustained them through 
the hardships and dangers of their great enter- 
prise are amply reflected in their own writings. 
If these are not so much literature as the raw ma- 
terials of literature, they have at least been fortu- 
nate in finding interpreters among their descend- 
ants, and no modern Virginian has done for the 
memory of the Jamestown planters what Haw- 
thorne, vVhittier, Longfellow, and others have done 
in casting the glamour of poetry and romance over 
the lives of the founders of New England. 

Cotton Mather, in his Magfialia, quotes the fol- 
lowing passage from one of those election sermons, 
delivered before the General Court of Massachu- 
setts, which formed for many years the great an- 
nual intellectual event of the colony: *' The ques- 
tion was often put unto our predecessors, What 
went ye out into the wilderness to see 2 And the 
answer to it is not only too excellent but too no- 
torious to be dissemble^. . . . We cam.e hither 
because we would have our posterity settled under 
the pure and full dispensations of the gospel, de- 
fended by rulers that should be of ourselves." 
The New England colonies were, in fact, theoc- 
racies. Their leaders were clergymen or laymen, 
whose zeal for the faith was no whit inferior to 
that of the ministers themselves. Church and 
State were one. The freeman's oath was only 
administered to Church members, and there was 
no place in the social system for unbelievers or 



The Colonial Period. 21 

dissenters. The Pilgrim fathers regarded their 
transplantation to the New World as an exile, and 
nothing is more touching in their written records 
than the repeated expressions of love and longing 
toward the old home which they had left, and 
even toward that Church of England from which 
they had sorrowfully separated themselves. It was 
not in any light or adventurous spirit that they 
faced the perils of the sea and the wilderness. 
"This howling wilderness," ''these ends of the 
earth," " these goings down of the sun," are some 
of the epithets which they constantly applied to 
the land of their exile. Nevertheless they had 
come to stay, and, unlike Smith and Percy and 
Sandys, the early historians and writers of New 
England cast in their lots permanently with the 
new settlements. A few, indeed, went back after 
1640 — Mather says some ten or twelve of the min- 
isters of the first "classis" or immigration were 
among them — when the victory of the Puritanic 
party in Parliament opened a career for them in 
England, and made their presence there seem in 
some cases a duty. Tlie celebrated Hugh Peters, 
for example, who was afterv/ard Oliver Cromwell's 
chaplain, and was beheaded after the Restoration, 
went back in 1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward, 
the minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author 
of a quaint book against toleration, entitled The 
Simple Cobbler of Agawam^ written in America 
and published shortly after its author's arrival \x\ 
England. The Civil War, too, put a stop to fur- 



22 American Literature. 

ther emigration from England until after the Res- 
toration in 1660. 

The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted 
of men of the middle class, artisans and husband- 
men, the most useful members of a new colony. 
But their leaders were clergymen educated at the 
universities, and especially at Emanuel College, 
Cambridge, the great Puritan college; their civil 
magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of 
education and substance, like the elder Winthrop, 
who was learned in the law, and Theophilus Eaton, 
first governor of New Haven, who was a London 
merchant of good estate. It is computed that 
there were in New England during the first gene- 
ration as many university graduates as in any 
community of equal population in the old country. 
Almost the first care of the settlers was to establish 
schools. Every town of fifty families was required 
by law to maintain a common school, and every 
town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin 
school. In 1636, only sixteen years after the land- 
ing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, Harvard 
College was founded at Newtown, whose name was 
thereupon changed to Cambridge, the General 
Court held at Boston on September 8, 1680, hav- 
ing already advanced £a^o *' by way of essay 
towa'rds the building of something to begin a col- 
lege." " An university," says Mather, '' which hath 
been to these plantations, for the good literature 
there cultivated, sal Gentium . . . and a river, 
without the streams whereof these regions would 



The Colonial Period. 23 

have been mere unwatered places for the devil," 
By 1 701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous off- 
shoot, Yale College, at New Haven, the settlers of 
New Haven and Connecticut plantations having 
increased sufficiently to need a college at their 
own doors. A printing press was set up at Cam- 
bridge in 1639, which was under the oversight of 
the university authorities, and afterwards of li- 
censers appointed by the civil power. The press 
was no more free in Massachusetts than in Vir- 
ginia, and that ^' liberty of unlicensed printing," 
for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his 
Areopagitica, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New 
England until some twenty years before the out- 
break of the Revolutionary War. '* The Freeman's 
Oath " and an almanac were issued from the Cam- 
bridge press in 1639, and in 1640 the first English 
book printed in America, a collection of the psalms 
in meter, made by various ministers, and known 
as the Bay Psalm Book. The poetry of this ver- 
sion was worse, if possible, than that of Sternhold 
and Hopkins's famous rendering ; but it is note- 
worthy that one of the principal translators was 
that devoted ''Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. 
John Eliot, who, in 1661-63, translated the Bible 
into the Algonkin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled 
a lifetime for the conversion of those *' salvages," 
*'tawnies," ''devil-worshipers," for whom our early 
writers have usually nothing but bad words. They 
have been destroyed instead of converted; but his 
(so entitled) Alamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up- 



24 American Literature. 

Biblum God vaneeswe Nukkone Testament kak 
wonk WusJzu Testament — the first Bible printed in 
America— remains a monument of missionary zeal 
and a work of great value to students of the Indian 
languages. 

A modern writer has said that, to one looking 
back on the history of old New England, it seems 
as though the sun shone but dimly there, and the 
landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is 
the impression which one carries away from the 
perusal of books like Bradford's and Winthrop's 
Journals, or Mather's Wonders of the Imnsible 
World : an impression of gloom, of night and cold, 
of mysterious fears besieging the infant settle- 
ments, scattered in a narrow fringe " between the 
groaning forest and the shore." The Indian ter- 
ror hung over New England for more than half a 
century, or until the issue of King Philip's War, in 
1676, relieved the colonists of any danger of a 
general massacre. Added to this were the per- 
plexities caused by the earnest resolve of the set- 
tlers to keep their New English Eden free from 
the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heret- 
ical sects in religion. The Puritanism of Massa- 
chusetts was an orthodox and conservative Puri- 
tanism. The later and more grotesque out-crops 
of the movement in the old England found no tol- 
eration in the new. But these refugees for con- 
science' sake were compelled in turn to persecute 
Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, 
Anti-pedobaptists, and later, Quakers, and still 



The Colonial Period. 25 

later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into their pre- 
cincts and troubled the Churches with " prophesy- 
ings " and novel opinions. Some of these were 
banished, others were flogged or imprisoned, and a 
few were put to death. Of the exiles the most 
noteworthy was Roger Williams, an impetuous, 
warm-hearted man, who was so far in advance of 
his age as to deny the power of the civil magistrate in 
cases of conscience, or who, in other words, main-* 
tained the modern doctrine of the separation of 
Church and State. Williams was driven away 
from the Massachusetts colony — where he had 
been minister of the Church at Salem — and with a 
few followers fled into the southern wilderness, 
and settled at Providence. There and in the neigh- 
boring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he 
obtained a charter, he established his patriarchal 
rule, and gave freedom of worship to all comers. 
Williams was a prolific writer on theological sub- 
jects, the most important of his writings being, 
perhaps, his Bloody Tenent of Persecution, 1644, 
and a supplement to the same called out by a 
reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. 
John Cotton, minister of the First Church at Bos- 
ton, entitled The Bloody Tenent Washed a7id made 
White in the Blood of the Lamb. Williams was 
also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he 
thought, should not be taken from them without 
payment, and he anticipated Eliot by writing, in 
1643, a Key into the Language of Af?ierica. Al- 
though at odds with the theology of Massachu- 



26" American Literature. 

setts Bay, Williams remained in correspondence 
with Winthrop and others in Boston, by whom he 
was highly esteemed. He visited England in 1643 
and 1652, and made the acquaintance of John 
Milton. 

Besides the threat of an Indian war and their 
anxious concern for the purity of the Gospel in 
their Churches, the colonists were haunted by su- 
perstitious forebodings of the darkest kind. It 
seemed to them that Satan, angered by the setting 
up of the kingdom of the saints in America, had 
"come down in great wrath," and was present 
among them, sometimes even in visible shape, to 
terrify and tempt. Special providences and un- 
usual phenomena, like earthquakes, mirages, and 
tlie northern lights, are gravely recorded by Win- 
throp and Mather and others as portents of super- 
natural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchin- 
son, the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, 
according to rumor, been delivered of a monstrous 
birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open assembly, at 
Boston, upon a lecture day, " thereupon gathered 
that it might signify her error in denying inherent 
righteousness." " There will be an unusual range 
of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a little be- 
fore the second coming of our Lord. The evening 
wolves will be much abroad when we are near the 
evening of the world." This belief culminated in 
the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, 
that '' spectral puppet, play," which, beginning with 
the malicious pranks of a few children who ac- 



The Colonial Period. 27 

cused certain uncanny old women and other per- 
sons of mean condition and suspected lives of 
having tormented them with magic, gradually drew 
into its vortex victims of the highest character, 
and resulted in the judicial murder of over nine- 
teen people. Many of the possessed pretended to 
have been visited by the apparition of a little black 
man, who urged them to inscribe their names in ^ 
red book which he carried — a sort of muster-roll 
of those who had forsworn God's service for the 
devil's. Others testified to having been present at 
meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult 
now to read without contempt the "evidence" 
which grave justices and 1-earned divines consid- 
ered sufficient to condemn to death men and 
women of unblemished lives. It is true that the 
belief in witchcraft was general at that time all 
over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases 
of witch-burnings had occurred in different parts 
of America and Europe. Sir Thomas Browne, in 
his Rcligio Medici^ 1635, affirmed his belief in 
witches, and pronounced those who doubted of 
them " a sort of atheist." But the superstition 
came to a head in the Salem trials and executions, 
and was the more shocking from the general high 
level of intelligence in the community in which 
these were held. It would be well if those who 
lament the decay of " faith " would remember what 
things were done in New England in the name of 
faitli less than two hundred years ago. It is not 
wonderful that, to the Massachusetts Puritans of 



28 American Literature. 

the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held 
no beautiful" suggestion; to them it was simply a 
grim and hideous wilderness, whose dark aisles 
were the ambush of prowling savages and the ren- 
dezvous of those other " devil-worshipers " who 
celebrated there a kind of vulgar Walpurgis 
night. 

* The most important of original sources for the 
history of the settlement of New England are the 
journals of William Bradford, first governor of 
Plymouth, and John Winthrop. the second gov- 
ernor of Massachusetts, which hold a place cor- 
responding to the writings of Captain John Smith 
in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober 
and trustworthy. Bradford's History of Plymouth 
Plantation covers the period from 1620 to 1646. 
The manuscript was used by later annalists, but 
remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, hav- 
ing been lost during the war of the revolution and 
recovered long afterward in England. Winthrop's 
Journal, or History of New England, begun on 
shipboard in 1630, and extending to 1649, was not 
published entire until 1826. It is of equal author- 
ity with Bradford's, and perhaps, on the whole, the 
more important of the two, as the colony of Mas- 
sachusetts Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly 
outwent Plymouth in wealth and population, 
though not in priority of settlement. The interest 
of Winthrop's Journal lies in the events that it 
records rather than in any charm in the historian's 
manner of recording them. His style is pragmatic, 



The Colonial Period. 29 

and some of the incidents which he gravely notes 
are trivial to the modern mind, though instructive 
as to our forefathers' way of thinking. For instance, 
of the year 1632: "At Watertown there was (in 
the view of divers witnesses) a great combat be- 
tween a mouse and a snake, and after a long fight 
the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The 
pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy 
man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation : that 
the snake was the devil, th^ mouse was a poor, 
contemptible people, which God had brought 
hither, which should overcome Satan here and 
dispossess him of his kingdom." The reader of 
Winthrop's Journal covciQ?, every-where upon hints 
which the imagination has since shaped into poetry 
and romance. The germs of many of Longfellow's 
Neiv England Tragedies, of Hawthorne's Maypole 
of Merrymount, of Endicott's Red Cross, and of 
Whittier's ^^/2« Under hill and. The Familists' Hymn 
are all to be found in som.e dry, brief entry of the 
old Puritan diarist. " Robert Cole, having been 
oft punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to 
wear a red D about his neck for a year," to wit, 
the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to the 
greatest American romance, The Scarlet Letter. 
The famous apparition of the phantom ship in 
New Haven harbor, " upon the top of the poop a 
man standing with one hand akimbo under his left 
side, and in his right hand a sword stretched out 
toward the sea," was first chronicled by Winthrop 

under the year 1648. This meterological phenom- 

A 



30 American Literature. 

enon took on the dimensions of a full-grown myth 
some forty years later, as related, with many em- 
bellishments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of New 
Haven, in a letter to Cotton Mather. Winthrop 
put great faith in special providences, and among 
other instances narrates, not without a certain 
grim satisfaction, how " the Mary Rose^ a ship of 
Bristol, of about 200 tons," lying before Charles- 
ton, was blown in pieces with her own powder, 
being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of 
God appeared, "for the master and company were 
many of them profane scoffers at us and at the or- 
dinances of rehgion here." Without any effort at 
dramatic portraiture or character sketching, Win- 
throp managed in all simplicity, and by the plain 
relation of facts, to leave a clear impression of 
many of the prominent figures in the first Massa- 
chusetts immigration. In particular there gradu- 
ally arises from the entries in his diary a very dis- 
tinct and diverting outline of Captain John Un- 
derhill, celebrated in Whittier's poem. He was 
one of the few professional soldiers who came over 
with the Puritan fathers, such as John Mason, the 
hero of the Pequot War, and Miles Standish, 
whose Courtship Longfellow sang. He had seen 
service in the Low Countries, and in pleading the 
privilege of his profession "he insisted much upon 
the liberty which all States do allow to military 
officers for free speech, etc., and that himself had 
spoken sometimes as freely to Count Nassau." 
Captain Underbill gave the colony no end of 



The Colonial Period. 31 

trouble, both by his scandalous living and his 
heresies in religion. Having been seduced into 
Famiiistical opinions by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, 
who was banished for her beliefs, he was had up 
before the General Court and questioned, among 
other points, as to his own report of the manner of 
his conversion. *' He had lain under a spirit of 
bondage and a legal way for years, and could get 
no assurance, till, at length, as he was taking a 
pipe of tobacco, the Spirit set home an absolute 
promise of free grace with such assurance and joy 
as he never since doubted of his good estate, nei- 
ther should he, though he should fall into sin. . . . 
The Lord's day following he made a speech in the 
assembly, showing that as the Lord was pleased to 
convert Paul as he was in persecuting, etc., so he 
might manifest himself to him as he was taking 
the moderate use of the creature called tobacco." 
The gallant captain, being banished the colony, 
betook himself to the falls of the Piscataquack (Ex- 
eter, N. H.), where the Rev. John Wheelwright, 
another adherent of Mrs. Hutchinson, had gath- 
ered a congregation. Being made governor of 
this plantation. Underbill sent letters to the Mas- 
sachusetts magistrates, breathing reproaches and 
imprecations of vengeance. But meanwhile it was 
discovered that he had been living in adultery at 
Boston with a young woman whom he had seduced, 
the wife of a cooper, and the captain was forced to 
make public confession, which he did with great unc- 
tion and in a manner highly dramatic. '' He came 



32 American Literature. 

in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great 
pride in his bravery and neatness), without a band, in 
a foul linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and 
standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs 
and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course." 
There is a lurking humor in the grave Winthrop's 
detailed account of Underhill's doings. Winthrop's 
own personality comes out well in his Journal. 
He was a born leader of men, a conditor imperii^ 
just, moderate, patient, wise, and his narrative 
gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of 
the general prudence and fair-mindedness of the 
Massachusetts settlers in their dealings with one 
another, with the Indians, and with the neighbor- 
ing plantations. 

Considering our forefathers' errand and calling 
into this wilderness, it is not strange that their 
chief literary staples were sermons and tracts in 
controversial theology. Multitudes of tliese were 
written and published by the divines of the first 
generation, such as John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, 
John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, 
the founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said 
that "when he was doing his Master's business he 
would put a king into his pocket." Nor were their 
successors in the second or the third generation 
any less industrious and prolific. They rest from 
their labors and tlieir works do follow them. 
Their sermons and theological treatises are not 
literature, they are for the most part dry, heavy, 
and dogmatic, but they exhibit great learning, log- 



The Colonial Period. 33 

ical acuteness, and an earnestness which some- 
times rises into eloquence. The pulpit ruled New 
England, and the sermon was the great intellectual 
engine of the time. The serious thinking of the 
Puritans was given almost exclusively to religion; 
the other world was all their art. The daily secu- 
lar events of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissi- 
tude of the seasons, were important enough to find 
record in print only in so far as they manifested 
God's dealings with his people. So much was the 
sermon depended upon to furnish literary food 
that it was the general custom of serious minded 
laymen to take down the words of the discourse in 
their note-books. Franklin, in his Autobiography^ 
describes this as the constant habit of his grand- 
father, Peter Folger; and Mather, in his life of the 
elder Winthrop, says that " tho' he wrote not after 
the preacher, yet such was his attention and such 
his retention in hearing, that he repeated unto his 
family the sermons which he had heard in the 
congregation." These discourses were commonly 
of great length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pul- 
pit hour-glass was silently inverted while the ora- 
tor pursued his theme even unto «'thly. 

The book which best sums up the life and 
thought of this old New England of the seven- 
teenth century is Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi 
Americana. Mather was by birth a member of that 
clerical aristocracy which developed later into Dr. 
Holmes's " Brahmin Caste of New England." His 
maternal grandfathec was John Cotton. His fa- 



34 American Literature. 

ther was Increase Mather, the most learned divine 
of his generation in New England, minister of the 
North Church of Boston, President of Harvard 
College, and author, inter alia, of that character- 
istically Puritan book, An Essay for the Recording 
of Illustrious Providences. Cotton Mather himself 
was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of dili- 
gence. He was graduated from Harvard at fif- 
teen. He ordered his daily life and conversation 
by a system of minute observances. He was a 
book-worm, whose life was spent between his 
library and his pulpit, and his published works 
number upward of three hundred and eighty. Of 
these the most important is the Magnalia, 1702, 
an ecclesiastical history of New England from 
1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I. Antiqui- 
ties; n. Lives of the Governors; HL Lives of 
Sixty Famous Divines; IV. A History of Harvard 
College, with biographies of its eminent graduates; 
V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith ; VI. Won- 
derful Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord, 
that is, an account of the Afflictions and Disturb- 
ances of the Churches and the Conflicts with the 
Indians. The plan of the work thus united that 
of Fuller's Worthies of England and Church His- 
tory with that of Wood's Athence Oxonienses and 
Fox's Book of Martyrs. 

Mather's prose was of the kind which the En- 
glish Commonwealth writers used. He was younger 
by a generation than Dryden; but as literary fash- 
ions are slower to change in a colony than in the 



The Colonial Period. 35 

mother country, that nimble English which Dry- 
den and the Restoration essayists introduced had 
not yet displaced in New England the older man- 
ner. Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style 
of Taylor, Milton, Brown, Fuller, and Burton, a 
style ponderous with learning and stiff with allu- 
sions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quota- 
tioris«from the Greek and the Latin. A page of 
ihe Magnalia is almost as richly mottled with 
italics as one from the Anatomy of Melancholy, and 
the quaintness which Mather caught from his fa- 
vorite Fuller disports itself in textual pun and mar- 
ginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his 
books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker 
as having ''^angled many scores of souls into the 
kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs, Hutch- 
inson's surname into " the non-such;" and having 
occasion to speak of Mr. Urian Oaks's election to 
the presidency of Harvard College, enlarges upon 
the circumstance as follows: 

"We all know that Britain knew nothing more 
famous than their ancient sect of DRUIDS; the 
philosophers, whose order, they say, was instituted 
by one Samothes, which is in English as much as 
to say, an heavenly man. The Celtic name Deru^ 
for an Oak was that from whence they received 
their denomination ; as at this very day the Welch 
call this tree Drew, and this order of men Der~ 
ivyddon. But there are no small antiquaries who 
derive this oaken religion and philosophy from the 
Oaks of Mamre^ where the Patriarch Al?ra/ia?n 



36 American Literature. 

had as well a dwelling as an altar. That Oaken- 
Plain and the eminent OAK under which Abra- 
ham lodged was extant in the days of Constantiney 
as Isidore^ Jerom, and Sozamen have assured us. 
Yea, there are shrewd probabilities that Noah him- 
self had lived in this very Oak-plain before him ; 
for this very place was called Oyy?/, which was the 
name of Noah, so styled from the Oggyan {sWbcin- 
eritiis panibus) sacrifices, which he did use to offer 
in this renowned Grove. And it was from this ex- 
ami)le that the ancients and particularly that the 
Druids of the nations, chose oake?i retirements for 
their studies. Reader, let us now, upon another ac- 
count, behold the students of Harvard College., as 
a rendezvous of happy Druids., under the influ- 
ences of so rare a president. But, alas ! our joy 
must be short-lived, for on July 25, 1681, the 
stroke of a sudden death felled the tree^ 

" Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes 
Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cypressi. 

Mr. Oakes thus being transplanted into the better 
world, the presidentship was immediately tendered 
unto Mr. Increase Mather." 

This will suffice as an example of the bad taste 
and laborious pedantry which disfigured Mather's 
writing. In its substance the book is a perfect 
thesaurus; and inasmuch as nothing is unimpor- 
tant in the history of the beginnings of such a na- 
tion as this is and is destined to be, the Magnalia 
will always remain a valuable and interesting work. 



The Colonial Period. 37 

Cotton Mather, born in 1663, was of the second 
generation of Americans, his grandfather being of 
the immigration, but his father a native of Dor- 
chester, Mass. A comparison of his writings and 
of the writings of his contemporaries with the 
works of Bradford, Winthrop, Hooker, and others 
of the original colonists, shows that the simple and 
heroic faith of the Pilgrims had hardened into for- 
malism and doctrinal rigidity. The leaders of the 
Puritan exodus, notwithstanding their intolerance 
of errors in belief, were comparatively broad-mind- 
ed men. They were sharers in a great national 
movement, and they came over when their cause 
was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the 
eve of its coming triumph at home. After the 
Restoration, in 1660, the currents of national feel- 
ing no longer circulated so freely through this 
distant member of the body politic, and thought 
in America became more provincial. The English 
dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage as 
compared with the Church of England, had the 
great benefit of living at the center of national life, 
and of feeling about them the pressure of vast 
bodies of people who did not think as they dicT 
In New England, for many generations, the dom- 
inant sect had things all its own way, a condition 
of things which is not healthy for any sect or party. 
Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear 
in their writings very much like so many Puritan 
bishops, jealous of their prerogatives, magnifying 
their apostolate, and careful to maintain their au- 



38 American Literature. 

thority over the laity. Mather had an appetite for 
the marvelous, and took a leading part in the witch- 
craft trials, of which he gave an account in his 
IVo/iders of the Invisible World, 1693. To the 
quaint pages of the Magnalia our modern authors 
have resorted as to a collection of romances or 
fairy tales. Whittier, for example, took from 
ihence the subject of his poem The Garrison of 
Cape Anjie; and Hawthorne embodied in Grand- 
father s Chair the most elaborate of Mather's bi- 
ographies. This was the life of Sir William 
Phipps, who, from being a poor shepherd boy in 
his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal 
governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose 
wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a 
Spanish treasure ship, sunk on a reef near Port de 
la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some 
ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bul- 
lion, and plate and jewels and "pieces of eight." 

Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief 
Justice of Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and 
venerable figure, who is intimately known through 
his Diary kept from 1673 to 1729. This has been 
Compared with the more famous diary of Samuel 
Pepys, which it resembles in its confidential char- 
acter and the completeness of its self-revelation, 
but to which it is as much inferior in historic in- 
terest as '* the petty province here " was inferior in 
political and social importance to " Britain far 
away." For the most part it is a chronicle of 
small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae 



The Colonial Period. 39 

of his domestic life and private affairs, even to the 
recording of such haps as this: " March 23, I had 
my liair cut by G. Barret." But it also affords in- 
structive glimpses of public events, such as King 
Philip's War, the Quaker troubles, the English 
Revolution of 1688, etc. It bears about the same 
relation to New England history at the close of the 
seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's 
journals bear to that of the first generation. Sewall 
was one of the justices who presided at the trial of 
the Salem witches ; but for the part which he took 
in that wretched affair he made such atonement as 
was possible, by open confession of his mistake and 
his remorse in the presence of the Church. Sewall 
was one of the first writers against African slavery, 
in his brief tract, The Selling of Joseph^ printed at 
Boston in 1700. His Phenomena Quoedani Apoca- 
lyptica, a mystical interpretation of prophecies con- 
cerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies 
with America, is remembered only because Whit- 
tier, in his Prophecy of Samuel Sewall, has para- 
phrased one poetic passage, which shows a loving 
observation of nature very rare in our colonial 
writers. 

Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, 
in the narrower sense — that is, of the imaginative 
representation of life — there was little or none in 
the colonial period. There were no novels, no 
plays, no satires, and — until the example of the 
Spectator had begun to work on this side the 
water — no experiments even at the lighter forms 



40 American Literature. 

of essay writing, character sketches, and literary 
criticism. There was verse of a certain kind, but 
the most generous stretch of the term would hardly 
allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early 
divines of New England relieved their pens, in 
the intervals of sermon writing, of epigrams, ele- 
gies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles 
distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called 
" metaphysical poets," whose manner was in fash- 
ion when the Puritans left England; the manner 
of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the 
New English muse, the Emblems of Quarles and 
the Divine Week of Du Bartas, as translated by 
Sylvester. The Magnalia contains a number of 
these things in Latin and English, and is itself 
well bolstered with complimentary introductions 
in meter by the author''s friends. For example: 

COTTONIUS MaTHERUS. 

ANAGRAM. 

Tttos Tecum Ornasti. 

"While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise 
Thine, with thyself, thou dost ijumortalize. 
To view the odds thy learned lives invite 
'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite. 
But all succeeding ages shall despair 
A fitting monument for thee to rear. 
Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace !) 
Hath given them a lasting 7vrit of ease." 

The epitaphs and mortuary verses were espe- 
cially ingenious in the matter of puns, anagrams, 



The Colonial Period. 41 

and similar conceits. The death of the Rev. Sam- 
uel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of 
this sort not to be missed, and his threnodist ac- 
cordingly celebrated him as a "whetstone," a 
" loadstone," an " Ebenezer " — 

*' A stone for kingly David's use so fit 

As would not fail Goliah's front to hit," etc. 

The most characteristic, popular, and widely 
circulated poem of colonial New England was 
Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (166^, a 
kind of doggerel Inferno^ which went through 
nine editions, and "was the solace," says Lowell, 
"of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by 
which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier rel- 
ish to its premonitions of eternal combustion." 
Wigglesworth had not the technical equipment of 
a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language rude 
and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his ma- 
terial hell are more likely to move mirth than fear 
in a modern reader. But there are an unmistaka- 
ble vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief 
in his gloomy poem which hold it far above con- 
tempt, and easily account for its universal cur- 
rency among a people like the Puritans. One 
stanza has been often quoted for its grim conces- 
sion to unregenerate infants of "the easiest room 
in hell " — a limbus infantum which even Origen 
need not have scrupled at. 

The most authoritative expounder of New En- 
gland Calvinism was Jonathan Edwards (1703- 



42 American Literature. 

1758), a native of Connecticut, and a graduate of 
Yale, who was minister for more than twenty years 
over the Church in Northampton, Mass., afterward 
missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the 
time of his death had just been inaugurated presi- 
dent of Princeton College. By virtue of his In- 
quiry into the Freedom of the Will, i754> Edwards 
holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his 
age. This treatise was composed to justify, on 
philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic doctrines of 
foreordination and election by grace, though its 
arguments are curiously coincident with those of 
the scientific necessitarians, whose conclusions are 
as far asunder from Edwards's "as from the center 
thrice to the utmost pole." His writings belong to 
theology rather than to literature, but there is an 
intensity and a spiritual elevation about them, 
apart from the profundity and acuteness of the 
thought, which lift them here and there into the 
finer ether of purely emotional or imaginative art. 
He dwelt rather upon the terrors than the comfort 
of the word, and his chosen themes were the dog- 
mas of predestination, original sin, total deprav- 
ity, and eternal punishment. The titles of his ser- 
mons are significant: Men Naturally God's Ene- 
mies, Wrath upon the Wicked to the Utter?nost, llie 
Final Judgment, etc. *' A natural man," he wrote 
in the first of these discourses, "has a heart like 
the heart of a devil. . . . The heart of a natural 
man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, 
cold corpse is of vital heat." Perhaps the most 



The Colonial Period. 43 

famous of Edwards's sermons was Sinners in the 
Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield, 
Conn., July 8, 1741, ''at a time of great awaken- 
ings," and upon the ominous text, Their foot shall 
slide in due time. '' The God that holds you over 
the pit of hell " runs an oft-quoted passage from 
this powerful denunciation of the wrath to come, 
" much as one holds a spider or some loathsome 
insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully 
provoked. . . . You are ten thousand times more 
abominable in his eyes than the most hateful ven- 
omous serpent is in ours. . . . You hang by a slender 
thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing 
about it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you, he 
will be so far from pitying you in your doleful case 
that he will only tread you under foot. . . . He 
will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it 
shall be" sprinkled on his garments so as to stain 
all his raiment." But Edwards was.a rapt soul, pos- 
sessed with the love as well as the fear of the God, and 
there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his 
Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 1746. Such 
is his portrait of Sarah Pierpont, '' a young lady in 
New Haven," who afterward became his wife, and 
who " will sometimes go about from place to place 
singing sweetly, and no one knows for what. She 
loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, 
and seems to have some one invisible always con- 
versing with her." Edwards's printed works num- 
ber thirty-six titles. A complete edition of them 
in te« volumes was published in 1829 by his great- 



44 American Literature. 

grandson, Sereno Dvvight. The memoranda from 
Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and 
biographer, exhibit a remarkable precocity. Even 
as a school-boy and a college student he had made 
deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, 
and, as might have been predicted of a youth of 
his philosophical insight and ideal cast of mind, 
he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the 
existence of matter. In passing from Mather to 
Edwards, we step from the seventeenth to the 
eighteenth century. There is the same difference 
between them in style and turn of thought as be- 
tween Milton and Locke, or between Fuller and 
Dryden. The learned digressions, the witty con- 
ceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with 
scraps of Latin, have fallen off, even as the full- 
bottomed wig and the clerical gown and bands 
have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress 
of the modern minister. In Edwards's English all 
is simple, precise, direct, and business-like. 

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), who was strictly 
contemporary with Edwards, was a contrast to him 
in every respect. As Edwards represents the spir- 
ituality and other-worldliness of Puritanism, Frank- 
lin stands for the worldly and secular side of Amer- 
ican character, and he illustrates the development 
of the New England Englishman into the modern 
Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality 
or romance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, 
intensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, 
inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's sturdy figure 



The Colonial Period. 45 

became typical of his time and his people. He was 
the first and the only man of letters in colonial 
America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame, and 
impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the 
mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of com- 
mon sense and of the useful virtues; with the en- 
terprise but without the nervousness of his mod- 
ern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness 
of mind with the sagacity and quickness of resource 
of the self-made business man. He was repre- 
sentative also of his age, an age of aufkldrung, 
edaircissement , or " clearing up." By the middle 
of the eighteenth century a change had taken place 
in American society. Trade had increased be- 
tween the different colonies; Boston, New York, 
and Philadelphia were considerable towns; demo- 
cratic feeling was spreading; over forty newspapers 
were published in America at the outbreak of the 
Revolution ; politics claimed more attention than 
formerly, and theology less. With all this inter- 
course and mutual reaction of the various colonies 
upon one another, the isolated theocracy of New 
England naturally relaxed somewhat of its grip on 
the minds of the laity. When Franklin was a 
printer's apprentice in Boston, setting type on his 
brother's Neiv England Courant^ the fourth Amer- 
ican newspaper, he got hold of an odd volume of 
the Spectator^ and formed his style upon Addison, 
whose manner he afterward imitated in his Busy- 
Body papers in the Philadelphia Weekly Mercitry. 
He also read Locke and the English deistical writ- 



46 American Literature. 

ers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became himself a 
deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when prac- 
ticing his trade in London, in 1724-26, he made 
the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author of the 
Fable of the Bees, at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, 
called " The Horns," where the famous free-thinker 
presided over a club of wits and boon companions. 
Though a native of Boston, Franklin is identified 
with Philadelphia, whither he arrived in 1723, a 
runaway 'prentice boy, " whose stock of cash con- 
sisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in 
copper." The description in his Autobiography of 
his walking up Market Street munching a loaf of 
bread, and passing his future wife, standing on her 
father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as 
the anecdote about Whittington and his cat. 

It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was 
greatest, as an originator and executor of projects 
for the general welfare. The list of his public 
services is almost endless. He organized the 
Philadelphia fire department and street cleaning 
service, and the colonial postal system which grew 
into the United States Post Office Department. 
He started the Philadelphia public library, the 
American Philosophical Society, the University of 
Pennsylvania, and the first American magazine, 
The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle; so 
that he was almost singly the father of whatever intel- 
lectual life the Pennsylvania colony could boast of. 
In 1754, when commissioners from the colonies met 
at Albany, Franklin proposed a plan, w^hich was 



The Colonial Period. 47 

adopted, for the union of all the colonies under 
one government. But all these things, as well as 
his mission to England in 1757, on behalf of the 
Pennsylvania Assembly in its dispute with the pro- 
prietaries; his share in the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence — of which he was one of the signers — 
and his residence in France as Embassador of the 
United Colonies, belong to the political history of 
the country; to the history of American science 
belong his celebrated experiments in electricity ; 
and his benefits to mankind in both of these de- 
partments were aptly summed up in the famous 
epigram of the French statesman Turgot: 

*^ Erupuit coelo fiihnen sceptrumque tyrattnis.'* 

Franklin's success in Europe was such as no 
American had yet achieved, as few Americans 
since him have achieved. Hume and Voltaire 
were among his acquaintances and his professed 
admirers. In France he was fairly idolized, and 
when he died Mirabeau announced, " The genius 
which has freed America and poured a flood of 
light over Europe has returned to the bosom of 
the Divinity." 

Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great 
writer, though as a writer, too, he had many ad- 
mirable and some great qualities. Among these 
Avere the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. 
His more strictly literary performances, such as his 
essays after the Spectator, hardly rise above medi- 
ocrity, and are neither better nor worse than other 



48 American Literature. 

imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter 
bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charm- 
ing playfulness which have won them enduring 
favor. Such are his famous story of the Whistle, 
his Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout, his 
letters to Madame Helvetius, and his verses enti- 
tled Paper. The greater portion of his writings 
consists of papers on general politics, commerce, 
and political economy, contributions to the public 
questions of his day. These are of the nature of 
journalism rather than of literature, and many of 
them were published in his newspaper, the Penn- 
sylvania Gazette, the medium through which for 
many years he most strongly influenced American 
opinion. The most popular of his writings were 
his Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanac. 
The former of these was begun in 177 1, resumed 
in 1788, but never completed. It has remained 
the most widely current book in our colonial lit- 
erature. Poor Richard's Almatiac, begun in 1732 
and continued for about twenty-five years, had an 
annual circulation often thousand copies. It was 
filled with proverbial sayings in prose and verse, 
inculcating the virtues of industry, honesty, and 
frugality.* Some of these were original with 
Franklin, others were selected from the proverbial 
wisdom of the ages, but a new force was given 

* The Way to Wealth, Plan for Savi7ig One Hundred 
Thonsand Pounds, Rules of Health, Adviee to a Voting 
Tradesman, The Way to Make Money Plenty in Every 
Mans Pocket, etc. 



The Colonial Period. 49 

them by pungent turns of expression. Poor Rich- 
ard's saws were such as these : " Little strokes 
fell great oaks;" ''Three removes are as bad as 
a fire;" '^ Early to bed and early to rise makes a 
man healthy, wealthy, and wise ;" " Never leave 
that till to-morrow which you can do to-day;" 
''What maintains one vice would bring up two 
children;" "It is hard for an empty bag to stand 
upright." 

Now and then there are truths of a higher kind 
than these in Franklin, and Sainte Beuve, the great 
French critic, quotes, as an example of his occa- 
sional finer moods, the saying, " Truth and sincer- 
ity have a certain distinguishing native luster about 
them which cannot be counterfeited ; they are like 
fire and flame that cannot be painted." But the 
sage who invented the Franklin stove had no dis- 
dain of small utilities; and in general the last word 
of his philosophy is well expressed in a passage of 
his Autobiography : "Human felicity is produced 
not so much by great pieces of good fortune, that 
seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur 
every day ; thus, if you teach a poor young man to 
shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may 
contribute more to the happiness of his life than in 
giving him a thousand guineas." 

1. Captain John Smith. A True Relation of 
Virginia. Deane's edition. Boston: 1866. 

2. Cotton Mather. Magnalia Christi Americana. 
Hartford: 1820. 

4 



50 American Literature. 

3. Samuel Sewall. Diary. Massachusett's His- 
torical Collections. Fifth Series. Vols, v, vi, and 
vii. Boston: 1878, 

4. Jonathan Edwards. Eight Sermons on Vari- 
ous Occasions. Vol. vii. of Edwards's Words. 
Edited by Sereno Dwight. New York: 1829. 

5. Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography. Edited 
by John Bigelow. Philadelphia: 1869. [J. B. 
Lippincott & Co.] 

6. Essays and Bagatelles. Vol. ii. of Franklin's 
Works. Edited by Dav44 Sparks. Boston: 1836. 

7. Moses Coit Tyler. A History of American 
Literature. 1607-1765. New York: 1878. [G. 
P. Putnam's Sons.] 



The Revolutionary Period. 51 



CHAPTER II. 
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. 

1765-1815. 

It will be convenient to treat the fifty years 
which elapsed between the meeting at New York, 
in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine colo- 
nies, to protest against the Stamp Act, and the 
close of the second war with England, in 1815, as, 
for literary purposes, a single period. This half 
century was the formative era of the American 
nation. Historically it is divisible* into the years 
of revolution and the years of construction. But 
the men who led the movement for independence 
were also, in great part, the same who guided in 
shaping the Constitution of the new republic, and 
the intellectual impress of the whole period is one 
and the same. The character of the age was as 
distinctly political as that of the colonial era — in 
New England at least — was theological ; and liter- 
ature must still continue to borrow its interest from 
history. Pure literature, or what, for want of a 
better term we call belles lettres, was not born in 
America until the nineteenth century was well 
under way. It is true that the Revolution had its 
humor, its poetry, and even its fiction ; but these 



52 jAmerican Literature. 

were strictly for the home market. They hardly 
penetrated the consciousness of Europe at all, and 
are not to be compared with the contemporary 
work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan 
and Burke. Their importance for us to-day is 
rather antiquarian than literary, though the most 
noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due 
course in the present chapter. It is also true that 
one or two of Irving's early books fall within the 
last years of the period now under consideration. 
But literary epochs overlap one another at the 
edges, and these writings may best be postponed 
to a subsequent chapter. 

Among the most characteristic products of the 
intellectual stir that preceded and accompanied 
the revolutionary movement, were the speeches of 
political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, 
and Josiah Quincy in Massachusetts, and Patrick 
Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of a free 
people, and a^ in the forensic assemblies of Greece 
and Rome, and in the Parliament of Great Britain, 
so in the conventions and congresses of revolution- 
ary America it sprang up and flourished naturally. 
The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a 
rhetorical age; and the influence of Johnson's oro- 
tund prose, of the declamatory Letters of Junius^ 
and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and 
the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our 
early congresses. The fame of a great orator, like 
that of a great actor, is largely traditionary. The 
spoken word transferred to the printed page loses 



The Revolutionary Period. 53 

the glow which resided in the man and the mo- 
ment. A speech is good if it attains its aim, if it 
moves the hearers to the end which is sought. 
But the fact that this end is often temporary and 
occasional, rather than universal and permanent, 
explains why so few speeches are really literature. 
If this is true, even where the words of an orator 
are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is 
doubly true when we have only the testimony of 
contemporaries as to the effect which the oration 
produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, 
and Quincy were either not reported at all or 
very imperfectly reported, so that posterity can 
judge of them only at second hand. Patrick 
Henry has fared better, many of his orations being 
preserved in substance, if not in the letter, in Wirt's 
biography. Of these the most famous was the de- 
fiant speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 
28, 1775, throwing down the gauge of battle to the 
British ministry. The ringing sentences of this 
challenge are still declaimed by school boys, and 
many of them remain as familiar as household 
words. " I have but one lamp by which my feet 
are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I 
know of no way of judging of the future but by 
the past. . . . Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, 
but there is no peace. ... Is life so dear, or peace 
so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains 
and slavery! Forbid it, Almighty God' I know 
not what course others may take, but as for me, 
give me liberty, or give me death!" The elo^ 



54 American Literature. 

quence of Patrick Henry was fervid rather than 
weighty or rich. But if such specimens of the 
oratory of the American patriots as have come 
down to us fail to account for the wonderful im- 
pression that their words are said to have pro- 
duced upon their fellow-countrymen, we should 
remember that they are at a disadvantage when 
read instead of heard. The imagination should 
supply all those accessories which gave them vital- 
ity when first pronounced: the living presence 
and voice of the speaker; the listening Senate; the 
grave excitement of the hour and of the impend- 
ing conflict. The wordiness and exaggeration; the 
'highly latinized diction ; the rhapsodies about 
freedom which hundreds of Fourth-of-July ad- 
dresses have since turned into platitudes — all these 
coming hot from the lips of men whose actions in 
the field confirmed the earnestness of their speech 
— were effective enough in the crisis and for the 
purpose to which they were addressed. 

The press was an agent in the cause of liberty 
no less potent than the platform, and patriots 
such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Han- 
cock wrote constantly for the newspapers essays 
and letters on the public questions of the time 
signed ^'Vindex," '* Hyperion," "Independent," 
"Brutus," "Cassius," and the like, and couched in 
language which to the taste of to-day seems rather 
over rhetorical. Among the most important of 
these political essays were the Circular Letter to 
each Colonial Legislature^ published by Adams 



The Revolutionary Period. 55 

and Otis in 1768; Quincy's Observations on the 
Bos to ft Fort Bill^ 1774, and Otis's Rights of the 
British Colonies^ a pamphlet of one hundred and 
twenty pages, printed in 1764. No collection of 
Otis's writings has ever been made. The life of 
Quincy, published by his son, preserves for pos- 
terity his journals and correspondence, his news- 
paper essays, and his speeches at the bar, taken 
from the Massachusetts law reports. 

Among the political literature which is of peren- 
nial interest to the American people are such 
State documents as the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, the Constitution of the United States, and 
the; messages, inaugural addresses, and other writ- 
ings of our early presidents. Thomas Jefferson, 
the third president of the United States, and the 
father of the Democratic party, was the author of 
the Declaration of Independence, whose opening 
sentences have become commonplaces in the mem- 
ory of all readers. One sentence in particular has 
been as a shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of 
faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion : 
*'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all 
men are created equal ; that they are endowed by 
their Creator with certain unalienable rights ; that 
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness." Not so familiar to modern readers is 
the following, which an English historian of our 
literature calls " the most eloquent clause of that 
great document," and "the most interesting sup- 
pressed passage in American literature." Jefferson 



56 American Literature. 

was a southerner, but even at that early day the 
South had grown sensitive on the subject of sla- 
very, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George 
for promoting the " peculiar institution " was left 
out from the final draft of the Declaration in def- 
erence to southern members. 

"He has waged cruel war against human nature 
itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and 
liberty, in the persons of a distant people who 
never offended him, captivating and carrying them 
into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur 
miserable death in their transportation thither. 
This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel 
powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of 
Great Britain. Determined to keep open a mar- 
ket where men should be bought and sold, he 
has prostituted his negative by suppressing every 
legislative attempt to restrain this execrable com- 
merce. And, that this assemblage of horrors 
might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is 
now exciting those very people to rise in arms 
against us, and purchase that liberty of which he 
deprived them by murdering the people upon 
whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off 
former crimes committed against the liberties of 
one people by crimes which he urges them to 
commit against the lives of another." 

The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun 
and other southern statesmen afterward adopted 
on the subject of slavery was not taken by the 
men of Jefferson's generation. Another famous 



The Revolutionary Period. 57 

Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, himself a 
slaveholder, in his speech on the militia bill in the 
House of Representatives, December 10, 181 1, 
said: "I speak from facts when I say that the 
night-bell never tolls for fire in Richmond that 
the mother does not hug her infant more closely 
to her bosom." This was said apropos of the 
danger of a servile insurrection in the event of a 
war with England — a war which actually broke out 
in the year following, but was not attended with 
the slave rising which Randolph predicted. Ran- 
dolph was a thorough-going " States rights " man, 
and though opposed to slavery on principle, he 
cried hands off to any interference by the General 
Government with the domestic institutions of the 
States. His speeches read better than most of his 
contemporaries'. They are interesting in their ex- 
hibit of a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, 
incisive, and expressed in a pungent and familiar 
style which contrasts refreshingly with the diplo- 
matic language and glittering generalities of most 
congressional oratory, whose verbiage seems to 
keep its subject always at arm's length. 

Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was 
his Inaugural Address of March 4, 1801, with its 
programme of "equal and exact justice to all men, 
of whatever state or persuasion, religious or po- 
litical ; peace, commerce, and honest friendship 
with all nations, entangling alliances with none ; 
the support of the State governments in all their 
rights; . . . absolute acquiescence in the decisions 



58 American Literature. 

of the majority ; . . . the supremacy of the civil 
over the military authority ; economy in the pub- 
lic expense ; freedom of religion, freedom of the 
press, and freedom of person under the protection 
of the habeas corpus^ and trial by juries impartially 
selected." 

During his six years' residence in France, as 
American Minister, Jefferson had become indoc- 
trinated with the principles of French democracy. 
His main service and that of his party — the Dem- 
ocratic or, as it was then called, the Republican 
party — to the young republic was in its insistence 
upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom 
of the individual from all forms of governmental 
restraint. Jefferson has some claims to rank as an 
author in general literature. Educated at William 
and Mary College in the old Virginia capital, 
Williamsburg, he became the founder of the Uni- 
versity of Virginia, in which he made special pro- 
vision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which 
the liberal scheme of instruction and discipline 
was conformed, in theory at least, to the "univer- 
sity idea." His Notes on Virginia are not without 
literary quaility, and one description, in particular, 
has been often quoted — the passage of the Poto- 
mac through the Blue Ridge — in which is this 
poetically imaginative touch : '' The mountain 
being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, 
through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue 
horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain coun- 
try, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and 



The Revolutionary Period. 59 

tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach 
and participate of the cahii below." 

After the conclusion of peace with England, in 
1783, political discussion centered about the Con- 
stitution, which in 1788 took the place of the looser 
Articles of Confederation adopted in 1778. The 
Constitution as finally ratified was a compromise 
between two parties — the Federalists, who wanted 
a strong central government, and the Anti-Fed- 
erals (afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), 
who wished to preserve State sovereignty. The 
debates on the adoption of the Constitution, both 
in the General Convention 6f the States, which met 
at Philadelphia in 1787, and in the separate State 
Conventions called to ratify its action, form a 
valuable body of comment and illustration upon 
the instrument itself. One of the most notable of 
the speeches in opposition was Patrick Henry's 
address before the Virginia Convention. " That 
this is a consolidated government," he said, '' is 
demonstrably clear ; and the danger of such a 
government is, to my mind, very striking." The 
leader of the Federal party was Alexander Ham- 
ilton, the ablest constructive intellect among the 
statesmen of our revolutionary era, of whom Tal- 
leyrand said that he "had never known his equal;" 
whom Guizot classed with " the men who have 
best known the vital principles and fundamental 
conditions of a government worthy of its name and 
mission." Hamilton's speech On the Expediency 
of Adopting the Federal Constitution^ delivered in 



6o American Literature. 

the Convention of New York, June 24, 1788, was 
a masterly statement of the necessity and advan- 
tages of the Union. But the most complete ex- 
position of the constitutional philosophy of the 
Federal party was the series of eighty-five papers 
entitled the Federalist^ printed during the years 
1787-88, and mostly in the Independent Journal 
of New York, over th© signature ^''Publius!' These 
were the work of Hamilton, of John Jay, after- 
ward Chief Justice, and of James Madison, after- 
ward President of the United States. The Feder- 
alist papers, though written in a somewhat pon- 
derous diction, are among the great landmarks of 
American history, and were in themselves a polit- 
ical education to the generation that read ihem. 
Hamilton was a brilliant and versatile figure, a 
persuasive orator, a forcible writer, and as Secre- 
tary of the Treasury under Washington the fore- 
most of American financiers. He was killed, in a 
duel, by Aaron Burr, at Hoboken, in 1804. 

The Federalists were victorious, and under the 
provisions of the new Constitution George Wash- 
ington was inaugurated first President of the 
United States, on March 4, 1789. Washington's 
writings have been collected by Jared Sparks. 
They consist of journals, letters, messages, ad- 
dresses, and public documents, for the most part 
plain and business-like in manner, and without any 
literary pretensions. The most elaborate and the 
best known of them is his Farewell Address^ issued 
on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In 



The^ Revolutionary Period. 6i 

the composition of this he was assisted by Madi- 
son, Hamilton, and Jay. It is wise in substance 
and dignified, though somewhat stilted in expres- 
sion. The' correspondence of John Adams, second 
President of the United States, and his diary, kept 
from 1755-85; should also be mentioned as im- 
portant sources for a full knowledge of this period. 
In the long life -and -death struggle of Great 
Britain against the French Republic and its suc- 
cessor. Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in 
this country naturally sympathized with England, 
and the Jeffersonian Democracy with France. 
The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping ab- 
stractions of the French Revolution, and clung to 
the conservative notions of a checked and balanced 
freedom, inherited from English precedent, were ac- 
cused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On 
their side they were not slow to accuse their adver- 
saries of French atheism and French Jacobinism. 
By a singular reversal of the natural order of things 
the strength' of the Federalist party was in New 
England, which was socially democratic, while the 
strength of the Jeffersonian s was in the South, 
whose social structure — owing to the system of 
slavery — was intensely aristocratic. The war of 
181 2 with England was so unpopular in New En- 
gland, by reason of the injury which it threatened 
to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Con- 
vention of 1814 was more than suspected of a de- 
sign to bring about the secession of New England 
from the Union. A good deal of oratory was called 



62 American Literature. 

out by the debates on the commercial treaty with 
Great Britain, negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the 
Alien and Sedition Law of 1798, and by other 
pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the 
downfall of that party and the election of Jefferson 
to the presidency in 1800. The best of the Fed- 
eralist orators during those years was Fisher Ames, 
of Massachusetts, and the best of his orations was, 
perhaps, his speech on the British treaty in the 
House of Representatives, April 18, 1796. The 
speech was, in great measure, a protest against 
American chauvinism and the violation of inter- 
national obligations. "It has been said the world 
ought to rejoice if Britain was sunk in tlie sea ; if 
where there are now men and wealth and laws and 
liberty, there was no more than a sand bank for 
sea- monsters to fatten on; space for the storms of 
the ocean to mingle in conflict. . . . AVhat is patri- 
otism ? Is it a narrow affection for the spot where 
a man was born ? Are the very clods where we 
tread entitled to this ardent preference because 
they are greener? ... I see no exception to the 
respect that is paid among nations to the law of 
good faitl^. ... It is observed by barbarians — a 
whiff of tobacco smoke or a string of beads gives 
not merely binding force but sanctity to treaties. 
Even in Algiers a truce may be bought for money, 
but, when ratified, even Algiers is too wise or too 
just to disown and annul its obligation." Ames 
was a scholar, and his speeches are more finished 
and thoughtful, more literary^ in a way, than those 



The Revolutionary Period. 6^ 

of his contemporaries. His eulogiums on Wash- 
ington and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather 
excessive, perhaps, in laudation and in classical 
allusions. In all the oratory of the revolutionary 
period there is nothing equal in deep and con- 
densed energy of feeling to the single clause in Lin- 
coln's Gettysburg Address, " that we here highly 
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." 
A prominent figure during and after the War of 
the Revolution was Thomas Paine, or, as he vvas 
somewhat disrespectfully called, " Tom Paine." 
He was a dissenting minister who, conceiving 
himself ill treated by the British Government, 
came to Philadelphia in 1774 and threw himself 
heart and soul into the colonial cause. His 
pamphlet, Common Sense, issued in 1776, began 
with the famous words : *' These are the times that 
try men's souls." This was followed by the 
Crisis, a series of political essays advocating inde- 
pendence and the establishment of a republic, 
published in periodical form, though at irregular 
intervals. Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy 
was of great service to the American patriots. 
His writings were popular and his arguments were 
of a kind easily understood by plain people, ad- 
dressing themselves to the common sense, the 
prejudices and passions of unlettered readers. 
He afterward went to 'France and took an active 
part in the popular movement there, crossing 
swords with Burke in his Rights of Man, 1791-92, 
written in defense of the French Revolution. He 



64 American Literature. 

was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Con- 
vention ; but falling under suspicion during the 
days of the terror, he was committed to the prison 
of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall 
of Robespierre July 27, 1794. While in prison he 
wrote a portion of his best known work, the Age 
of Reason. This appeared in two parts in 1794 
and 1795, the manuscript of the first part having 
been intrusted to Joel Barlow, the American poet, 
who happened to be in Paris when Paine was sent 
to prison. 

The Age of Reason damaged Paine's reputation 
in America, where the name of *' Tom Paine " 
became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and 
a synonym for atheism and blasphemy. His book 
was denounced from a hundred pulpits, and copies 
of it were carefully locked away from the sight of 
*' the young," whose religious beliefs it might under- 
mine. It was, in effect, a crude and popular state- 
ment of the Deistic argument against Christianity. 
What the cutting logic and persiflage — the sourire 
hideiix — of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, 
with coarser materials, essayed to do for the English- 
speaking populations. Deism was in the air of 
the time ; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel 
Barlow, and other prominent Americans were 
openly or unavowedly deistic. Free thought, 
somehow, went along with democratic opinions, 
and was a part of the liberal movement of the age. 
Paine was a man without reverence, imagination, 
or religious feeling. He was no scholar, and he was 



The Revolutionary Period. 65 

not troubled by any perception of the deeper and 
subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. 
In his examination of the Old and New Testa- 
ments, he insisted that the Bible was an imposi- 
tion and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and ob- 
scenities. Supernatural Christianity, with all its 
mysteries and miracles, was a fraud practiced by 
priests upon the people, and churches were instru- 
ments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This 
way of accounting for Christianity would not now 
be accepted by even the most " advanced " think- 
ers. The contest between skepticism and revela- 
tion has long since shifted to other grounds. Both 
the philosophy and the temper of the Age of Reason 
belong to the eighteenth century. But Paine's 
downright pugnacious method of attack was ef- 
fective with shrewd, half-educated doubters, and 
in America well-thumbed copies of his book 
passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern 
or store, where the village atheist wrestled in 
debate with the deacon or the school-master. 
" When one part of God," exclaims Paine — to give 
an instance of the method and spirit of his book — 
''is represented as a dying man, and another part 
called the Holy Ghost, by a flying pigeon, it is 
impossible that belief can attach itself to such 
wild conceits. The book called the Book of Mat- 
thew says that the Holy Ghost descended in the 
shape of a dove. It might as well have said a 
goose ; the creatures are equally harmless, and 
the one is as much a nonsensical lie as the other." 
5 



66 American Literature. 

And again: "What is it the Testament teaches 
us ? — to believe that the Almighty committed de- 
bauchery with a woman engaged to be married ! 
And the belief of this debauchery is called faith." 
When we turn from the political and contro- 
versial writings of the Revolution to such lighter 
literature as existed, we find little that would de- 
serve mention in a more crowded period. The 
few things in this kind that have kept afloat on the 
current of time — ran' nanles in giirgite vasto — at- 
tract attention rather by reason of their fewness 
than of any special excellence that they have. 
During the eighteenth century American literature 
continued to accommodate itself to changes of 
taste in the old country. The so-called classical. 
or Augustan writers of the reign of Queen Anne 
replaced other models of style : the Spectator set 
the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from 
Franklin's Busybody down to the time of Irving, 
who perpetuated the Addisonian tradition later 
than any English writer. The influence of Locke, 
of Dr. Johnson, and of the Parliamentary orators 
has already been mentioned. In poetry the ex- 
ample of Pope was dominant, so that we find, for 
example, William Livingston, who became gov- 
ernor of New Jersey and a member of the Con- 
tinental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem on F/iilos- 
ophic Solitude which reproduces the trick of Pope*s 
antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the 
Rape of the Lock^ and the didactic morality of the 
Imitations from Horace and the Moral Essays : 



The Revolutionary Period. 67 

" Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms, 
Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms ; 
To shining palaces let fools resort 
And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. 
Mine be the pleasure of a rural life. 
From noise remote and ignorant of strife, 
Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, 
The lawless masquerade and midnight show ; 
From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, 
Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars." 



The most popular poem of the Revolutionary- 
period was John Trumbull's McFingal, published 
in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and in complete 
shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more 
than thirty editions in America, and was several 
times reprinted in England. McFi?igal was a 
satire in four cantos, directed against the Amer- 
ican Loyalists, and modeled quite closely upon 
Butler's mock heroic poem, Hudihras. As Butler's 
hero sallies forth to put down May games and 
bear-baitings, so the tory McFingal goes out 
against the liberty-poles and bon-fires of the 
patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and other- 
wise ill entreated, and finally takes refuge in the 
camp of General Gage at Boston. The poem is 
written with smartness and vivacity, attains often 
to drollery and sometimes to genuine humor. It 
remains one of the best of American political 
satires, and unquestionably the most successful of 
the many imitations of Hudibras, whose manner it 
follows so closely that some of its lines, which 



6S American Literature. 

have passed into currency as jjroverbs, are gen- 
erally attribued to Butler. For example : 



Or this: 



" No man e'er felt the halter draw 
"With good opinion of the law." 

" For any man with half an eye 
What stands before him may espy ; 
But optics sharp it needs, I ween, 
To see what is not to be seen." 



Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable 
points of his own countrymen, as in his sharp skit 
at slavery in the couplet about the newly adopted 
flag of the Confederation : 

" Inscribed with inconsistent types 
Of Liberty and thirteen stripes." 

Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut 
literati, who made much noise in their time as the 
"Hartford Wits." The other members of the 
group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, 
Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith, Theodore Dwight, and 
Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Bar- 
low had formed a friendship and a kind of literary 
partnership at Yale, where they were contempo- 
raries of each other and of Timothy Dwight. 
During the war they served in the army in various 
capacities, and at its close they found themselves 
again together for a few years at Hartford, where 
they formed a club that met weekly for social and 
literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of 



The Revolutionary Period. 69 

^clat to the little provincial capital, and their writ- 
ings made it for a time an intellectual center quite 
as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New 
York. The Hartford Wits were staunch Federal- 
ists, and used their pens freely in support of the 
administrations of Washington and Adams, and in 
ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats. In 
1786-87 Trumbull, Hopkins, Barlow, and Hum- 
phreys published in the New Haven Gazette a 
series of satirical papers endtled the Anarchiadt 
suggested by the English Rolliad, and purporting 
to be extracts from an ancient epic on " the 
Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." 
These papers were an effort to correct, by ridicule, 
the anarchic condition of things which preceded 
the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. 
It was a time of great confusion and discontent, 
when, in parts of the country, Democratic mobs 
were protesting against the vote of five years' pay 
by the Continental Congress to the officers of the 
American army. The Anarchiad was followed by 
the Echo and the Political Green House, written 
mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dvvight, and similar 
in character and tendency to the earlier series. 
Time has greatly blunted the edge of these satires, 
but they were influential in their day, and are an 
important part of the literature of the old Federal- 
ist party. 

Humphreys became afterward distinguished in 
the diplomatic service, and was, successively, 
embassador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he 



70 American Literature. 

introduced into America the breed of merino 
sheep. He had been on Washington's staff 
during the war, and was several times an inmate 
of his house at Mount Vernon, where he pro- 
duced, in 1785, the best known of his writings, 
Mount Vernon^ an ode of a rather mild descrip- 
tion, which once had admirers. Joel Barlow cuts 
a larger figure in contemporary letters. After 
leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to France, 
where he resided for seventeen years, made a 
fortune in speculations, and became imbued with 
French principles, writing a song in praise of the 
Guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old 
friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America, 
and built a fine residence near Washington, which 
he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary fame, in 
his own generation, rested upon his prodigious 
epic, the Columbiad. The first form of this was 
the Vision of Columbus^ published at Hartford in 
1787. This he afterward recast and enlarged into 
the Columbiad^ issued in Philadelphia in 1807, 
and dedicated to Robert Fulton, the inventor 
of the steamboat. This was by far the most 
sumptuous piece of book- making that had then 
been published in America, and was embel- 
lished with plates executed by the best London 
engravers. 

The Columbiad was a grandiose performance, 
and has been the theme of much ridicule by later 
writers. Hawthorne suggested its being drama- 
tized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery 



The Revolutionary Period. 71 

and thunder and lightning ; and E. P. Whipple 
declared that " no critic in the last fifty years had 
read more than a hundred lines of it." In its am- 
bitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the 
spirit of the age which was patriotically determined 
to create, by tour de force, a national literature of 
a size commensurate with the scale of American 
nature and the destinies of the republic. As Amer- 
ica was bigger than Argos and Troy, we ought to 
have a bigger epic than the Iliad. Accordingly, 
Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his 
prison to a "hill of vision," where he unrolls before 
his eye a panorama of the history of America, or, 
as our bards then preferred to call it, Columbia. 
He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; 
the rise and fall of the kingdom of the Incas in 
Peru ; the settlements of the English Colonies in 
North America ; the old French and Indian Wars ; 
the Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the fu- 
ture greatness of the new-born nation. The machin- 
ery of the Vision W3.S borrowed from the nth and 
1 2th books of Paradise Lost. Barlow's verse was the 
ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his po- 
etic style was distinguished by the vague, glittering 
^imagery and the false sublimity which marked the 
epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets. Though 
Barlow was but a masquerader in true heroic, he 
showed himself a true poet in mock heroic. His 
Hasty Pudding, written in Savoy in 1793, and dedi- 
cated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly Amer- 
ican, in subject at least, and its humor, though 



72 American Literature. 

over-elaborate, is good. One couplet in particular 
has prevailed against oblivion : 

" E'en in thy native regions how I blush 

To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee Mush ! " 

Another Connecticut poet — one of the seven who 
were fondly named "The Pleiads of Connecticut'* 
— was Timothy Dwight, whose Conquest of Catiaan, 
written shortly after his graduation from college, 
but not published till 1785, was, like the Colmnbiady 
an experiment toward the domestication of the 
epic muse in America. It was written like Bar- 
low's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic 
impulse of the time shows oddly in the introduc- 
tion of our Revolutionary War, by Avay of episode, 
among the wars of Israel. Greenfield Hill, 1794* 
was an idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of 
a rural parish in Connecticut of which the author 
was for a time the pastor. It is not quite withotit 
merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, 
Thomson, and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious 
and tame. Byron was amused that there should 
have been an American poet christened Timothy, 
and it is to be feared that amusement would have 
been the chief emotion kindled in the breast of the 
wicked Voltaire had he ever chanced to see the 
stern dedication to himself of the same poet*s Tri- 
umph of Infidelity, 1788. Much more important 
than Dwight's poetry was his able Theology Ex- 
plained and Defended, 1794, a restatement, with 
modifications, of the Calvinism of Jonathan Ed- 



The Revolutionary Period. 73 

wards, which was accepted by the Congregational 
churches of New England as an authoritative ex- 
ponent of the orthodoxy of the time. His Travels 
in JVetv England and JVew York, including descrip- 
tions of Niagara, the White Mountains, Lake 
George, the Catskills, and other passages of nat^ 
ural scenery, not so familiar then as now, was 
published posthumously in 182 1, was praised by 
Southey, and is still readable. As President of 
Yale College from 1795 to 181 7, Dwight, by his 
learning and ability, his sympathy with young 
men, and the force and dignity of his character, 
exerted a great influence in the community. 

The strong political bias of the time drew into 
its vortex most of the miscellaneous literature 
that was produced. A number of ballads, serious 
and comic. Whig and Tory, dealing with the bat- 
tles and other incidents of the long war, enjoyed 
a wide circulation in the newspapers, or were 
hawked about in printed broadsides. Most of 
these have no literary merit, and are now mere 
antiquarian curiosities. A favorite piece on the 
Tory side was the Cow Chase, a cleverish parody 
on Chevy Chase, written by the gallant and unfor- 
tunate Major Andre, at the expense of " Mad " An- 
thony Wayne. The national song Yankee Doodle 
was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the 
case with Jo/m Brown's Body and many other pop- 
ular melodies, some obscurity hangs about its 
origin. The air was an old one, and the words 
of the chorus seem to have been adapted or cor- 



74 American Literature. 

rupted from a Dutch song, and applied in derision 
to the Provincials by the soldiers of the British 
army as early as 1755. Like many another nick- 
name, the term Yankee Doodle was taken up by 
the nicknamed and proudly made their own. The 

stanza, 

"Yankee Doodle came to town," etc., 

antedates the war ; but the first complete set of 
words to the tune was the Yankee s Reiur?! from 
Cajfip, which is apparently of the year 1775. The 
most popular humorous ballad on the Whig side 
was the Battle of the Kegs, founded on a laughable 
incident of the campaign at Philadelphia. This 
was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadel- 
phian, and one of the signers of the Declaration 
of Independence. Hopkinson has some title to 
rank as one of the earliest American humorists. 
Without the kee^ wit of McFingal some of his 
Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings, pub- 
lished in 1792, have more geniality and heartiness 
than Trumbull's satire. His Letter on White- 
washi?tg is a bit of domestic humor that foretokens 
the Danhury News man, and his Modern Learn- 
ing, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in 
which a salt-box is described from the point of 
view of metaphysics, logic, natural philosophy, 
mathematics, anatomy, surgery and chemistry, long 
kept its place in school-readers and other collec- 
tions. His son, Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song 
of Hail Columbia, which is saved from insignifi- 
cance only by the music to which %t was married, 



The Revolutionary Period. 75 

the then popular air of ''The President's March." 
The words were written in 1798, on the eve c/ a 
threatened war with France, and at a time when 
party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by 
crowds in the streets, and for a whole season by a 
favorite singer at the theater; for by this time 
there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, 
and even in Puritanic Boston. Much better than 
Hail Columbia was the Star Spangled Batiner, the 
words of which were composed by Francis Scott 
Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by 
the British of Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, in 
181 2. More pretentious than these was the once 
celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., Adajus 
and Liberty^ recited at an anniversary of the Mas- 
sachusetts Charitable Fire Society. The sale oi 
this is said to have netted its author over $750, but 
it is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. 
Paine was a young Harvard graduate, who had 
married an actress playing at the old Federal 
Street Theater, the first play-house opened in 
Boston, in 1794. His name was originally Thomas, 
but this was changed for him by the Massachu- 
setts Legislature, because he did not wish to be 
confounded with the author of the Age of Reason. 
** Dim are those names erstwhile in battle loud," 
And many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought 
for liberty with sword and pen is now utterly for- 
gotten, or consigned to the limbo of Duyckinck's 
Cyclopedia and Griswold's Poets of America. Here 
and there a line has, by accident, survived to do 



76 American Literature. 

duty as a motto or inscription, while all its context 
is buried in oblivion. Few have read any thing 
more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than 
the couplet, 

" No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, 
But the whole boundless continent is yours," 

taken from his Epilogue to Caio^ written in 1778. 

Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Fre- 
neau ; " that rascal Freneau," as Washington 
called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon 
his administration in Freneau's National Gazette. 
He was of Huguenot descent, was a classmate of 
Madison at Princeton College, was taken prisoner 
by the British during the war, and when the war 
was over, engaged in journalism, as an ardent sup- 
porter of Jefferson and the Democrats. Freneau's 
patriotic verses and political lampoons are now 
unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first 
real American poet, by virtue of his Wild Honey- 
suckle^ Indian Burying Ground, Indian Student, 
and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace 
and delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French 
blood. 

Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" 
hitherto mentioned were nothing but rhymers ; 
but in Freneau we meet with something of 
beauty and artistic feeling; something which still 
keeps his verses fresh. In his treatment of In- 
dian themes, in particular, appear for the first 
time a sense of the picturesque and poetic ele- 



The Revolutionary Period. 77 

ments in the character and wild life of the red 
man, and that pensive sentiment which the fad- 
ing away of the tribes toward the sunset has left 
in the wake of their retreating footsteps. In 
this Freneau anticipates Cooper and Longfellow, 
though his work is slight compared with the 
Leaf her stocki7ig Tales or Hiawatha. At the time 
when the Revolutionary War broke out the popu- 
lation of the colonies was over three millions ; 
Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and 
the frontier had retired to a comfortable distance 
from the sea-board. The Indian had already 
grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau 
fetches his Indian Student not from the outskirts 
of the settlement, but from the remote backwoods 
of the State : 

" From Susquehanna's farthest springs, 
Where savage tribes pursue their game 

(His blanket tied with yellow strings), 
A shepherd of the forest eame." 

Campbell " lifted " — in his poem O' Conors Child 
— the last line of the following stanza from Fre- 
neau 's Indian Burying Ground: 

*' By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, 

In vestments for the chase arrayed. 
The hunter still the deer pursues — 

The hunter and the deer a shade." 

And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to 
borrow, in Marmion^ the final line of one of the 



78 American Literature. 

stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw 
Springs: 

"They saw their injured country's woe, 
The flaming town, the wasted fijeld ; 
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe ; 
They took the spear, but left the shield." 

Scott inquired of an American gentleman who 
visited him the authorship of this poem, which he 
had by heart, and pronouced it as fine a thing of 
the kind as there was in the language. 

The American drama and American prose 
fiction had their beginnings during the period 
now under review. A company of English play- 
ers came to this country in 1752 and made the 
tour of many of the principal towns. The first 
play acted here by professionals on a public 
stage was the Merchant of Venice^ which was 
given by the English company at Williamsburg, 
Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building 
was at Annapolis, Md., where in the same year 
this troupe performed, among other pieces, Far- 
quhar's Beaux Stratagem. In 1753 a theater was 
built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadel- 
phia. The Quakers of Philadelphia and the Puri- 
tans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the 
acting of plays, and in the latter city the players 
were several times arrested during the perform- 
ances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding dra- 
matic performances. At Newport, R. I., on the 
other hand, which was a health resort for planters 
from the Southern States and the West Indies, 



The Revolutionary Period. 79 

and the largest slave-market in the North, the 
actors were hospitably received. The first play- 
known to have been written by an American was 
the Prince of Parthia^ 1765, a closet drama, by 
Thomas Godfrey, of Philadelphia. The first play 
by an American writer, acted by professionals in 
a public theater, was Royal Tyler's Contrast^ per- 
formed in New York in 1786. The former of 
these was very high tragedy, and the latter very 
low comedy ; and neither of them is otherwise 
remarkable than as being the first of a long line 
of indifferent dramas. There is, in fact, no Amer- 
ican dramatic literature worth speaking of; not a 
single American play of even the second rank, un- 
less we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like 
Mr. Howetl's Elevator and Sleeping-Car. Royal 
Tyler, the author of the Contrast, cut quite a 
figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and 
eventually became Chief Justice of Vermont. His 
comedy, the Georgia Spec, 1797, had a great run 
in Boston, and his Algerine Captive, published in 
the same year, was one of the earliest American 
novels. It was a rambling tale of adventure, con- 
structed somewhat upon the plan of Smollett's 
novels and dealing with the piracies which led to 
the war between the United States and Algiers 
in 1815. 

Charles Brockden Brown, the first American 
novelist of any note, was also the first professional 
man of letters in this country who supported him- 
self entirely by his pen. He was born in Phila- 



8o American Literature. 

delphia in 1771, lived a part of his life in New 
York and part in his native city, where he started, 
in 1803, \\^^Literary Magazine and American 
Register. During the years 1798-1801 he pub- 
lished in rapid succession six romances, Wieland^ 
Ormonde Arthur Afervyn, Edgar Huntley, Clara 
Howard, and Jane Talbot. Brown was an invalid 
and something of a recluse, with a relish for the 
ghastly in incident and the morbid in character. 
He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and 
Hawthorne, though his art was greatly inferior to 
Poe's, and almost infinitely so to Hawthorne's. 
His books belong more properly to the contem- 
porary school of fiction in England which preceded 
the " Waverley Novels " — to the class that includes 
Beckford's Vathek, Godwin's Caleb Williams and 
St. Leon, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, and such 
" Gothic " romances as Lewis's Monk, Walpole's 
Castle of Otranto, and Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of 
Udolpho. A distinguishing characteristic of this 
whole school is what we may call the clumsy-hor- 
rible. Brown's romances are not wanting in in- 
ventive power, in occasional situations that are in- 
tensely thrilling, and in subtle analysis of charac- 
ter; but they are fatally defective in art. The 
narrative is by turns abrupt and tiresomely prolix, 
^proceeding not so much by dialogue as by elabo- 
rate dissection and discussion of motives and states 
of mind, interspersed with the author's reflections. 
The wild improbabilities of plot and the unnatural 
and even monstrous developments of character 



The Revolutionary Period. 8i 

are in startling contrast with the old-fashioned pre- 
ciseness of the language ; the conversations, when 
there are any, being conducted in t%j|^insipid dia- 
lect in which a fine woman was called an " elegant 
female." ■ The following is a sample description of 
one of Brown's heroines, and is taken from his 
novel of Ormond^ the leading character in which — 
a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish 
wickedness — is thought to have been suggested by 
Aaron Burr: "Helena Cleves was endowed with 
every feminine and fascinating quality. Her feat- 
ures were modified by the most transient senti- 
ments and were the seat of a softness at all times 
blushful and bewitching. All those graces of sym- 
metry, smoothness and lustre, which assemble in 
the imagination of the painter when he calls from 
the bosom oi her natal deep the Paphian divinity, 
blended their perfections in the shade, com- 
plexion, and hair of this lady." But, alas! "Hel- 
ena's intellectual deQciencies could not be con- 
cealed. She was proficient in the elements of no 
science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as 
disproportionate with her intellects as with those 
of the mock-bird. She had not reasoned on the 
principles of human action, nor examined the 
structure of society. . . . She could not commune 
in their native dialect with the sages of Rome and 
Athens. . . . The constitution of nature, the at- 
tributes of its Author, the arrangement of the 
parts of the external universe, and the substance, 
modes of operation, and ultimate destiny of human 



82 American Literature. 

intelligence were enigmas unsolved and insoluble 
by her." 

Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mys- 
tery on a basis ludicrously weak. Thus the hero 
of his first novel, Wieland (whose father antici- 
pates " Nemo," in Dickens's Bleak House^ by dying 
of spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he 
mistakes for spiritual voices to kill his wife and 
children ; and the voices turn out to be produced 
by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of 
the story. Similarly in Edgar Huntley\ the plot 
turns upon the phenomena of sleep-walking. 
Brown had the good sense to place the scene of 
his romances in his own country, and the only 
passages in them which have now a living interest 
are his descriptions oi wilderness scenery in Ed- 
gar Huntley^ and his graphic account in Arthur 
Meriryn of the yellow-fever epidemic in Philadel- 
phia in 1793. Shelley was an admirer of Brown, 
and his experiments in prose: fiction, such as Zas- 
trozzi and Si. Ir-oyne the Rasicruciati^ are of the 
same abnormal and speculative type. 

Another book which falls within this period was 
the Journal^ i774i of John Woolman, a New Jer- 
sey Quaker, which has received the highest praise 
from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others. 
*' Get the writings of John Woolman by heart,'* 
wrote Lamb, "and love the early Quakers." The 
charm of this journal resides in its singular sweet- 
ness and innocence of feeling, the '* deep inward 
stillness " peculiar to the people called Quakers. 



The Revolutionary Period. 83 

Apart from his constant use of certain phrases 
peculiar to the Friends, Woolman's English is 
also remarkably graceful and pure, the transparent 
medium of a soul absolutely sincere, and tender 
and humble in its sincerity. When not working 
at his trade as a tailor, VVoolman spent his time in 
visiting and ministering to the monthly, quarterly, 
and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on 
horseback to their scattered communities in the 
backwoods of Virginia and North Carolina, and 
northward along the coast as far as Boston and 
Nantucket. He was under a *' concern " and a 
" heavy exercise " touching the keeping of slaves, 
and by his writing and speaking did much to in- 
fluence the Quakers against slavery. His love 
went out, indeed, to all the wretched and op- 
pressed ; to sailors, and to the Indians in partic- 
ular. One of his most perilous journeys was made 
to the settlements of Moravian Indians in the wil- 
derness of Western Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, 
and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna. Some of 
the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint 
7iaivete with which he expresses them, may make 
the modern reader smile — but it is a smile which 
is very close to a tear. Thus, when in England — 
where he died in 1772 — he would not ride nor 
send a letter by mail-coach, because the poor post- 
boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter 
nights, and were sometimes frozen to death. *' So 
great is the hurry in the spirit of this w^rld, that in 
aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth, 



84 American Literature. 

the creation at this day doth loudly groan." Again, 
having reflected that war was caused by luxury in 
dress, etc., the use of dyed garments grew uneasy 
to him, and he got and wore a hat of the natural 
color of the fur. *' In attending meetings, this 
singularity was a trial to me . . . and some Friends, 
who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew 
shy of me. . . . Those who spoke with me I gen- 
erally informed, in a few words, that I believed 
my wearing it was not in my own will." 

1 . Representative American Orations. Edited 
by Alexander Johnston. New York : G. P. Put- 
nam's Sons. 1884. 

2. The Federalist. New York: Charles Scrib- 
ner. 1863. 

3. Notes on Virginia. By Thomas Jefferson. 
Boston. 1829. 

4. Travels in New England and New York. 
By Timothy Dwight. New Haven. 1821. 

5. McFingal : in Trumbull's Poetical Works. 
Hartford : 1820. 

6. Joel Barlow's Hasty Pudding. Francis Hop- 
kinson's Modern Learning. Philip Freneau's In- 
dian Student^ Indian Burying-Ground, and White 
Honeysuckle: in Vol. I. of Duyckinck's Cyclopedia 
of American Literature. New York : Charles 
Scribner. 1866. 

7. Arthur Mervyn. By Charles Brockden Brown. 
Boston: S. G. Goodrich. 1827. 

8. The Journal of John Woolman. With an 



The Revolutionary Period. 85 

Introduction by John G. Whittier. Boston: James 
R. Osgood & Co. 1871. 

9. American Literature. By Charles F. Rich- 
ardson. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1887. 

10. American Literature. By John Nichol. 
Edinburgh : Adam & Charles Black. 1882. 



86 American Literature. 



CHAPTER III. 
THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION. 

1815-1837. 

The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological 
order must here be abandoned. About all the 
American literature in existence, that is of any 
value as literature, is the product of the past three 
quarters of a century, and the men who produced 
it, though older or younger, were still contempo- 
raries. Irving's K?iickerbocker s History of New 
York, 1809, was published within the recollection 
of some yet living, and the venerable poet, Richard 
H. Dana — Irving's junior by only four years — sur- 
vived to 1879, when the youngest of the genera- 
tion of writers that now occupy public attention 
had already won their spurs. Bryant, whose 
Thanatopsis was printed in 181 6, lived down to 
1878. He saw the beginnings of our national lit- 
erature, and he saw almost as much of the latest 
phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1887. 
Still, even within the limits of a single life-time, 
there have been progress and change. And so, 
while it will happen that the consideration of 
writers a part of whose work falls between the 
dates at the head of this chapter may be postponed 



The Era of National Expansion. 87 

to subsequent chapters, we may in a general way 
follow the sequence of time. 

The period between the close of the second war 
with England, in 18 [5, and the great financial 
crash of 1837, has been called, in language attrib- 
uted to President Monroe, ''the era- of good feel- 
ing." It was a time of peace and prosperity, of 
rapid growth in population and rapid extension 
of territory. The new nation was entering upon 
Its vast estates and beginning to realize its mani- 
fest destiny. -The peace with Great Britain, by 
calling off the Canadian Indians and the other 
tribes in alliance with England, had opened up 
the North-west to settlement. Ohio had been 
admitted as a State in 1802 ; but at the time of 
President Monroe's tour, in 181 7, Cincinnati had 
only seven thousand inhabitants, and half of the 
State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for 
most of its course through an unbroken wilder- 
ness. Chicago was merely a fort. Hitherto the 
emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it 
took on the dimensions of a general and almost 
a concerted exodus. This movement was stimu- 
lated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 
and the late spring of 1817, which produced a 
scarcity of food that amounted in parts of the 
interior to a veritable famine. All through this 
period sounded the axe of the pioneer clearing 
the forest about his log cabin, and the rumble of 
the canvas -covered emigrant wagon over the 
primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies 



88 American Literature. 

or followed the valley of the Mohawk. S. G. Good- 
rich, known in letters as " Peter Parley," in his 
Recollections of a Lifetime^ 1856, describes the part 
of the movement which he had witnessed as a boy 
in Fairfield County, Conn. : " I remember very well 
the tide of emigration through Connecticut, on its 
way to the West, during the summer of 181 7. 
Some persons went in covered wagons — frequent- 
ly a family consisting of father, mother, and nine 
small children, with one at the breast — some on 
foot, and some crowded together under the cover, 
with kettles, gridirons, feather beds, crockery, and 
the family Bible, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, and 
Webster's Spelling-book — the lares and penates of 
the household. Others started in ox-carts, and 
trudged on at the rate of ten miles a day. . . . 
Many of these persons were in a state of poverty, 
and begged their way as they went. Some died 
before they reached the expected Canaan ; many 
perished after their arrival from fatigue and priva- 
tion ; and others from the fever and ague, which 
was then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, 
I think, in 1818 that I published a small tract 
entitled ' Tother Side of Ohio — that is, the other 
view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was 
the paradise of the world. It was written by Dr. 
Hand — a talented young physician of Berlin — who 
had made a visit to the West about these days. It 
consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of 
the accidents and incidents attending this whole- 
sale migration. The roads over the Alleghanies 



The Era of National Expansion. 89 

between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then 
rude, steep, and dangerous, and some of the more 
precipitous slopes were consequently strewn with 
the carcases of wagons, carts, horses, oxen, which 
had made shipwreck in their perilous descents." 

But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life, 
the spirit of that time, as reflected in its writings, 
was a hopeful and a light-hearted one. 

" Westward the course of empire takes its way," 

runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on 
America. The New Englanders who removed to 
the Western Reserve went there to better them- 
elves; and their children found themselves the 
owners of broad acres of virgin soil, in place of 
the stony hill pastures of Berkshire and Litch- 
field. There was an attraction, too, about the 
wild, free life of the frontiersman, with all its 
perils and discomforts. The life of Daniel Boone, 
the pioneer of Kentucky— that " dark and bloody 
ground " — is a genuine romance. Hardly less 
picturesque was the old river life of the Ohio 
boatmen, before the coming of steam banished 
their queer craft from the water. Between 1810 
and 1840 the center of population in the United 
States had moved from the Potomac to the neigh- 
borhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the 
population itself had increased from seven to 
seventeen millions. The gain was made partly 
in the East and South, but the general drift was 
westward. During the years now under review, 



90 American Literature. 

the following new States were admitted, in the 
order named : Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Ala- 
bama, Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee had been made States in the 
last years of the eighteenth century, and Louisiana 
— acquired by purchase from France — in 1812. 

The settlers, in their westward march, left large 
tracts of wilderness behind them. They took up 
first the rich bottom lands along the river courses, 
the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the val- 
leys of the Mississippi and Missouri, and the shores 
of the great lakes. But there still remained back 
woods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the 
cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a 
population of more than one hundred thousand in 
1815. When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825, 
it ran through a primitive forest. N. P. Willis, who 
went by canal to Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, de- 
scribes the houses and stores at Rochester as 
standing among the burnt stumps left by the first 
settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of 
this great water way, the Indian tribes, numbering 
now about one hundred and thirty thousand souls, 
were moved across the Mississippi. Their power 
had been broken by General Harrison's victory 
over Tecumseh at the battle of Tippecanoe, in 
1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and 
fragments of the race which had hung upon the 
skirts of civilization, and disputed the advance of 
the white man for two centuries. It was not until 
some years later than this that railroads began 



The Era of National Expansion. 91 

to take an important share in opening up new 
country. 

The restless energy, the love of adventure, the 
sanguine anticipation which characterized Ameri- 
can thought at this time, the picturesque contrasts 
to be seen in each fliushrooin town where civiliza- 
tion was encroaching on the raw edge of the wil- 
derness — all these found expression, not only in 
such well-known books as Cooper's -P/^/'/^<?/-i', 1823, 
and Irving's Tour on the Prairies, 1835, but in 
the minor literature which is read to-day, if at all, 
not for its own sake, but for the light that it throws 
on the history of national development : in such 
books as Paulding's story of Westward Ho ! and 
his poem. The Backwoodsman, 181 8; or as Tim- 
othy Flint's Recollections, 1826, and his Geography 
and History of the Mississippi Valley, 1827. It was 
not an age of great books, but it was an age of 
large ideas and expanding prospects. The new 
consciousness of empire uttered itself hastily, 
crudely, ran into buncombe, " spread-eagleism," 
and other noisy forms of patriotic exultation ; but 
it was thoroughly democratic and American. 
Though literature — or at least the best literature 
of the time — was not yet emancipated from En- 
glish models, thought and life, at any rate, were 
no longer in bondage — no longer provincial. And 
it is significant that the party in office during 
these years was the Democratic, the party which 
had broken most completely with conservative 
traditions. The famous "Monroe doctrine" was 



92 American Literature. 

a pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, 
and though the FederaHsts returned to power for 
a single term, under John Quincy Adams (1825- 
1829,) Andrew Jackson received the largest num- 
ber of electoral votes, and Adams was only chosen 
by the House of Representafives in the absence 
of a majority vote for any one candidate. At the 
close of his term "Old Hickory," the hero of the 
people, the most characteristically democratic of 
our Presidents, and the first backwoodsman who 
entered the White House, was borne into office on 
a wave of popular enthusiasra. We have now ar- 
rived at the time when American literature, in the 
higher and stricter sense of the term, really began 
to have an existence. S. G. Goodrich, who settled 
at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in 181 8, 
says, in his Recollections : " About this time I began 
to think of trying to bring out original American 
works. . . . The general impression was that we 
had not, and' could not have, a literature. It was 
the precise point at which Sidney Smith had ut- 
tered that bitter taunt in the Edinburgh Revienf^ 
'Who reads an American book ? ' . . . It was posi- 
tively injurious to the commercial credit of a book- 
seller to undertake American works." Washington 
Irving (i 783-1859) was the first American author 
whose books, as books^ obtained recognition abroad ; 
whose name was thought worthy of mention beside 
the names of English contemporary authors, like 
Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also the 
first American writer whos® writings are still read 



The Era of National Expansion. 93 

for their own sake. We read Mather's Magnalia^ 
and Franklin's Autobiography^ and Trumbull's 
McFingal — if we read them at all — as history, and 
to learn about the times or the men. But we read 
the Sketch Book, and Knickerbocker s History of 
New York, and the Conquest of Granada for them- 
selves, and for the pleasure that they give as pieces 
of literary art. 

We have arrived, too, at a time when we may ap- 
ply a more cosmopolitan standard to the works of 
American writers, and may disregard many a minor 
author whose productions would have cut some 
figure had they come to light amid the poverty of 
our colonial age. Hundreds of these forgotten 
names, with specimens of their unread writings, are 
consigned to a limbo of immortality in the pages 
of Duyckinck's Cyclopedia, and of Griswold's Poets 
of America and Prose Writers of America. We 
may select here for special mention, and as most 
representative of the thought of their time, the 
names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and Channing. 

A generation was now coming upon the stage 
who could recall no other government in this 
country than the government of the United States, 
and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a 
tradition. Born in the very year of the peace, it 
was a part of Irving's mission, by the sympathetic 
charm of his writings and by the cordial recog- 
nition which he won in both countries, to allay 
the soreness which the second war, of 181 2-15, 
had left between England and America. He was~^ 



94 American Literature. 

well fitted for the task of mediator. Conservative 
by nature, early drawn to the venerable worship 
of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his 
tastes, with a preference for the past and its his- 
toric associations which, even in young America, 
led him to invest the Hudson and the region 
about New York with a legendary interest, he 
wrote of American themes in an English fashion, 
and interpreted to an American public the mellow 
attractiveness that he found in the life and scenery 
of Old England. He lived in both countries, and 
loved them both ; and it is hard to say whether 
Irving is more of an English or of an American 
writer. His first visit to Europe, in 1804-6, occu- 
pied nearly two years. From 18 15 to 1832 he was 
abroad continuously, and his ''domicile," as the 
lawyers say, during these seventeen years was 
really in England, though a portion of his time 
was spent upon the continent, and several succes- 
sive years in Spain, where he engaged upon the 
Life of Columbus, the Conquest of Granada, the 
Companions of Colu?nbus, and the Alhambra, all pub- 
lished between 1828-32. From 1842 to 1846 he 
was again in Spain as American Minister at Madrid. 
Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisoni- 
ans. His boyish letters, signed "Jonathan Old- 
style," contributed in 1802 to his brother's news- 
paper, the Morning Chronicle, were, like Franklin's 
Busybody, close imitations of the Spectator. To the 
same family belonged his Salmagundi papers, 1807, 
a series of town-satires on New York society, written 



The Era of National Expansion. 95 

in conjunction with his brother William and with 
James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays, and 
sketches which compose the Sketch Book were 
written in England, and published in America, in 
periodical numbers, in 1819-20. In this, which 
is in some respects his best book, he still main- 
tained that attitude of observation and spectator- 
ship taught him by Addison. The volume had a 
motto taken from Burton, " I have no wife nor 
children, good or bad, to provide for — a mere 
spectator of other men's fortunes," etc.; and "The 
Author's Account of Himself" began in true Ad- 
disonian fashion : '' I was always fond of visiting 
new scenes and observing strange characters and 
manners." 

But though never violently "American," like 
some later writers who have .consciously sought 
to throw off the trammels of English tradition, 
Irving was in a real way original. His most dis- 
tinct addition to our national literature was in his 
creation of what has been called *'the Knicker- 
bocker legend." He was the first to make use, 
for literary purposes, of the old Dutch traditions 
which clustered about the romantic scenery of the 
Hudson. Col. T. W. Higginson, in his History of 
the United States^ tells how " Mrs. Josiah Quincy, 
sailing up that river in 1786, when Irving was a 
child three years old, records that the captain of 
the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or 
traditional, for every scene, 'and not a mountain 
reared its head unconnected with some marvelous 



g6 American Literature. 

story.' " The material thus at hand Irving shaped 
into his Knickerbocker s History of New York, into 
the immortal story of Rip Van Winkle, and the 
Legend of Sleepy Hollow (both published in the 
Sketch Book), and in later additions to the same 
realm of fiction, such as Dolph Heyliger in Brace- 
bridge Hall, the Money Diggers, Wolfert Webber, 
and Kidd the Pirate, in the Tales of a Traveler, 
and in some of the miscellanies from the Knicker- 
bocker Magazine, collected into a volume, in 1855, 
under the title of Wolfert' s Roost. 

The book which made Irving's reputation was 
his Knickerbocker s History of New York, 1809, a 
burlesque chronicle, making fun of the old Dutch 
settlers of New Amsterdam, and attributed, by a 
familiar and now somewhat threadbare device,* to 
a little old gentleman named Diedrich Knick- 
erbocker, whose manuscript had come into the 
editor's hands. The book was gravely dedicated 
to the New York Historical Society, and it is said 
to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a 
certain German scholar named Goeller, in a note 
on a passage in Thucydides. This story, though 
well vouched, is hard of belief : for Knickerbocker, 
though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave 
irony of Swift in his Modest Proposal or of Defoe 
in his Short Way with Dissenters. Its mock-heroic 
intention is as transparent as in Fielding's paro- 
dies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, 

* Compare Cai'lyle's Herr Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, in Sartor 
Rcsartus^ the author of the famous "Clothes Philosophy." 



The Era of National Expansion. 



97 



particularly in the delightfully absurd description 
of the mustering of the clans under Peter Stuy- 
vesant and the attack on the Swedish Fort Chris- 
tina. Knickerbocker s History of New York was a 
real addition to the comic literature of the world ; 
a work of genuine humor, original and vital. 
Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of 
Swift, and had touches resemblmg Sterne. It is 
;jot necessary to claim for Irving's little master- 
piece a place beside Gulliver's Travels and Tris- 
tram Shandy. But it was, at least, the first Amer- 
ican book in the lighter departments of literature 
which needed no apology and stood squarely on 
its own legs. It was written, too, at just the right 
time. Although New Amsterdam had become 
New York as early as 1664, the impress of its first 
settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was 
still upon it when Irving was a boy. The descend- 
ants of the Dutch families formed a definite element 
not only in Manhattran, but all up along the kills of 
the Hudson, at Albany, at Schenectady, in West- 
chester County, at Hoboken, and Communipaw, 
localities made familiar to him in many a ramble 
and excursion. He lived to see the little provin- 
cial town of his birth grow into a great metropolis, 
in which all national characteristics were blended 
together, and a tide of immigration from Europe 
and New England flowed over the old landmarks 
and obliterated them utterly. 

Although Irving was the first to reveal to his 
countrymen the literary possibilities of their early 
7 



98 American Literature. 

history, it must be acknowledged that with mod- 
ern American life he had little sympathy. He 
hated politics, and in the restless democratic 
movement of the time, as we have described it, 
he found no inspiration. This moderate and 
placid gentleman, with his distrust of all kinds of 
fanaticism, had no liking for the Puritans or for 
their descendants, the New England Yankees, if 
we may judge from his sketch of Ichabod Crane, in 
the Legejid of Sleepy HoUouk His genius was remi- 
niscent, and his imagination, like Scott's, was the 
historic imagination. In crude America his fancy 
took refuge in the picturesque aspects of the past, 
in "survivals" like the Knickerbocker Dutch and 
the Acadian peasants, whose isolated communities 
on the lower Mississippi he visited and described. 
He turned naturally to the ripe civilization of the 
Old World. He was our first picturesque tourist, 
the first "American in Europe." He rediscovered 
England, whose ancient churches, quiet landscapes, 
memory-haunted cities, Christmas celebrations, 
and rural festivals had for him an unfailing attrac- 
tion. With pictures of these, for the most part, 
he filled the pages of the Sketch Book and Bj-ace- 
bridge Hall, 1822. Delightful as are these English 
sketches, in which the author conducts his readers 
to Windsor Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the 
Boar's Head Tavern, or sits beside him on the 
box of the old English stage-coach, or shares with 
him the Yuletide cheer at the ancient English 
country house, their interest has somewhat faded. 



The Era of National Expansion. 99 

The pathos of the Broken Heart and the Pride 
of the Village^ the mild satire of the Art of Book 
Makings the rather obvious reflections in West- 
minster Abbey are not exactly to the taste of this 
generation. They are the literature of leisure and 
retrospection ; and already Irving's gentle elabo- 
ration, the refined and slightly artificial beauty of 
his style, and his persistently genial and sympa- 
thetic attitude have begun to pall upon readers 
who demand a more nervous and accented kind 
of writing. It is felt that a little roughness, a little 
harshness, even, would give relief to his pictures 
of life. There is, for instance, something a little 
irritating in tlie old-fashioned courtliness of his 
manner toward women ; and one reads with a 
certain impatience smoothly punctuated passages 
like the following: "As the vine, which has long 
twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and been 
lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy 
plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it 
with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shat- 
tered boughs, so is it beautifully ordered by Prov- 
idence that woman, who is the mere dependent 
and ornament of man in his happier hours, should 
be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden 
calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses 
of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping 
head, and binding up the broken heart." 

Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with 
an imagination sufficiently fertile, and an observa- 
tion sufficiently acute to support those two main 



loo American Literature. 

qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong 
passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, in- 
deed, sometimes reached intensity. His humor 
was always delicate and kindly ; his sentiment 
never degenerated into sentimentality. His dic- 
tion was graceful and elegant — too elegant, per- 
haps ; and in his modesty he attributed the success 
of his books in England to the astonishment of 
Englishmen that an American could write good 
English. 

In Spanish history and legend Irving found a 
still newer and richer field for his fancy to work 
upon. He had not the analytic and philosophical 
mind of a great historian, and the merits of his 
Conquest of Granada and Life of Cohwibus are 
rather belleiristisch than scientific. But he brought 
to these undertakings the same eager love of the 
romantic past which had determined the charac- 
ter of his writings in America and England, and 
the result — whether vv^e call it history or romance — 
is at all events charming as literature. His Life 
of WasJmigton — completed in 1859 — was his ma^^- 
nu77i opus, and is accepted as standard authority. 
Maho7net and His Successors, 1850, was compara- 
tively a failure. But of all Irving's biographies, 
his Life of Oliver Golds7Jiith, 1849, was the most 
spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not 
impose it upon himself as a task, but wrote it from 
a native and loving sympathy with his subject, and 
it is, therefore, one of the choisest. literary memoirs 
in the language. 



The Era of National Ilxpansion. ioi 

When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he 
was the recipient of ahnost national honors. He 
had received the medal of the Royal Society of 
Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford 
University, and had made American literature 
known and respected abroad. In his modest 
home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river 
over which he had been the first to throw the 
witchery of poetry and romance, he was attended 
*to the last by the admiring affection of his coun- 
trymen. He had the love and praises of the fore- 
most English writers of his own generation and 
the generation which followed — of Scott, Byron, 
Coleridge, Thackera}', and Dickens, some of whom 
had been among his personal friends. He is 
not the greatest of American authors, but the 
influence of his writings is sweet and wholesome, 
and it is in many ways fortunate that the first 
American man of letters who made himself heard 
in Europe should have been in all particulars a 
gentleman. 

Connected with Irving, at least by name and 
locality, were a number of authors who resided 
in the city of New York and who are known as 
the Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they 
were contributors to the Knickerbocker Magazine. 
One of these was James K. Paulding, a con- 
nection of Irving by marriage, and his partner 
in the Salmagimdi Papers. Paulding became 
Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and 
lived down to the year i860. He was a volumi- 



I02 ' American Literature. 

nous author, but his writings had no power of 
continuance, and are already obsolete, with the 
possible exception of his novel, the Dutchman s 
Fireside, 1831. 

A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rod- 
man Drake, a young poet of great promise, who 
died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's 
patriotic lyric, the American Flag, is certainly the 
most spirited thing of the kind in our poetic liter- 
ature, and greatly superior to such national anthems 
as Hail Columbia and the Star Spangled Ban?ier. 
His Culprit Fay, published in 181 9, was the best 
poem that had yet appeared in America, if we ex- 
cept Bryant's Thanatopsis, which was three years 
the elder. The Culprit Fay was a fairy story, in 
which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to 
throw the glamour of poetry about the Highlands 
of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem 
was fanciful rather than imaginative ; but it is 
prettily and even brilliantly fanciful, and has main- 
tained its popularity to the present time. Such 
verse as the following— which seems to show that 
Drake had been reading Coleridge's C/iristabel, 
published three years before — was something new 
in American poetry : 

" The winds are whist and the owl is still, 

The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, 
And naught is heard on the lonely hill, 
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill, 

Of the gauze-winged katydid, 
And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will 



The Era of National Expansion. 103 

Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings 
Ever a note of wail and woe, 

T.ill morning spreads her rosy wings. 
And earth and sky in her glances glow." 



Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an 
American bird, and not the conventional lark or 
nightingale, although the elves of the Old World 
seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hud- 
son. Drake's memory has been kept fresh not 
only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful elegy 
written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first 
stanza of which is universally known: 

*' Green be the turf above thee, 

Friend of my better days ; 
None knew thee but to love thee. 

Nor named thee but to praise." 

Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, 
whither he retired in 1849, and resided there till 
his death in 1867, But his literary career is iden- 
tified with New York, He was associated with 
Drake in writing the Croaker Papers^ a series of 
humorous and satirical verses contributed in 1814 
to the Evening Post, These were of a merely 
local and temporary interest; but Halleck 's fine 
ode, Marco Bozzaris — though declaimed until it 
has become hackneyed — gives him a sure title to 
remembrance ; and his Alnwick Castle^ a monody> 
half serious and half playful on the contrasts be- 
tween feudal associations and modern life, has 



I04 American Literature. 

much of that pensive lightness which character- 
izes Praed's best vers de societe. 

A friend of Drake and Halleck was James 
Fenimore Cooper (i 789-1851), the first American 
novelist of distinction, and, if a popularity which 
has endured for nearly three quarters of a century 
is any test, still the most successful of ail Ameri- 
can novelists. Cooper was far more intensely 
American than Irving, and his books reached an 
even wider public. " They are published as soon 
as he produces them," said Morse, the electrician, 
in 1833, "in thirty-four different places in Europe. 
They have been seen by American travelers in the 
languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constantino- 
ple, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." Cooper 
wrote altogether too much ; he published, besides 
his fictions, a Naval History of the United States, 
a series of naval biographies, works of travel, and 
a great deal of controversial matter. He wrote 
over thirty novels, the greater part of which are 
little better than trash, and tedious trash at that. 
This is especially true of his tendenz novels and his 
novels of society. He was a man of strongly 
marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive 
to criticism, and abounding in prejudices. He was 
embittered by the scurrilous attacks made upon 
him by a portion of the American press, and spent 
a great deal of time and energy in conducting libel 
suits against the newspapers. In the same spirit 
he used fiction as a vehicle for attack upon the 
abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of 



The Era of National Expansion. 105 

his novels, written with this design, are worthless. 
Nor was Cooper well equipped by nature and tem- 
perament' for depicting character and passion in 
social life. Even in his best romances his heroines 
and his " leading juveniles " — to borrow a term from 
the amateur stage — are insipid and conventional. 
He was no satirist, and his humor was not of a high 
order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, 
unlike Irving, he had no style. 

Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the 
invention of incidents and plots, in a power of 
narrative and description in tales of wild advent- 
ure whicb keeps the reader in breathless excite- 
ment to the end of the book. He originated the 
novel of the sea and the novel of the wilderness. 
He created the Indian of literature ; and in this, his 
peculiar field, although he has had countless imi- 
tators, he has had no equals. Cooper's experi- 
ences had prepared him well for the kingship of 
this new realm in the world of fiction. His child- 
hood was passed on the borders of Otsego Lake, 
when central New York was still a wilderness, 
with boundless forests stretching westward, broken 
only here and there by the clearings of the pio- 
neers. He was taken from college (Yale) when 
still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant vessel, 
before the mast. Afterward he entered the navy 
and did duty on the high seas and upon Lake 
Ontario, then surrounded by virgin forests. He 
married and resigned his commission in 181 1, just 
before the outbreak of the war with England, so 



io6 American Literature. 

that he missed the opportunity of seeing active 
service in any of those engagements on the ocean 
and our great lakes which were so glorious to 
American arms. But he always retained an active 
interest in naval affairs. 

His first successful novel was The Spy, 1821, a 
tale of the Revolutionary War, the scene of which 
Was laid in Westchester County, N. Y., where the 
author was then residing. The hero of this story, 
Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn 
figures on his canvas. In 1823 he published the 
Pioneers, a work somewliat overladen with de- 
scription, in which he drew for materir# upon his 
boyish recollections of frontier life at Coopers- 
town. This was the first of the series of five ro- 
mances known as the Leatherstocking Tales. The 
otliers were the Last of the Mohicans, 1826; the 
Prairie, 1827; the Pathfinder, 1840; and the 
Deerslayer, 1841. The hero of this series. Natty 
Bumpo, or " Leatherstocking," was Cooper's one 
great creation in the sphere of charcter, his most 
original addition to the literature of the world in 
the way of a new human type. Tliis backwoods 
philosopher — to the conception of whom the his- 
toric exploits of Daniel Boone perhaps supplied 
some hints ; unschooled, but moved by noble 
impujses and a natural sense of piety and justice; 
passionately attached to the wilderness, and fol- 
lowing its westering edge even unto the prairies 
— this man of the woods was the first real Ameri- 
can in fiction. Hardly less individual and vital 



The Era of National Expansion. 107 

were the various types of Indian character, in 
Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist, and the Huron \var- 
riors. Inferior to these, but still vigorously 
though somewhat roughly drawn, were the waifs 
and strays of civilization, whom duty, or the hope 
of gain, or the love of adventure, or the outlawry 
of crime had driven to the wilderness — the solitary 
trap23er, the reckless young frontiersman, the offi- 
.cers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether 
Cooper's Indian was the real being, or an idealized 
and rather melo-dramatic version of the truth, has 
been a subject of dispute. However this be, he 
has taken his place in tlie domain of art, and it is 
safe to say that his standing there is secure. No 
boy will ever give him up. 

Equally good with the Leaihcrstocking novels, 
and equally national, were Cooper's tales of the 
sea, or at least the two best of them — the Pilot, 
1823, founded upon the daring exploits of John 
Paul Jones, and the Red Rover, 1828. But here, 
though Cooper still holds the sea, he has had to 
admit competitors; and Britannia, who rules the 
waves in song, has put in some claim to a share in 
the domain of nautical fiction in the persons of 
Mr.W. Clark^ Russell and others. Though Cooper's 
novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart 
and the imagination, their appeal to the universal 
love of a story is perennial. We devour them when 
we are boys, and if we do not often return to 
them when we are men, that is perhaps only be- 
cause we have read them before, and " know the 



io8 American Literature. 

ending." They are good yarns for the forecastle 
and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, 
though he may put the Deerslayer or the Last of the 
Mohicans away on the top-shelf, will take it down 
now and again, and sit up halt the night over it. 

Before dismissing the belles-lettres writings of 
this period, mention should be made of a few 
poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have 
taken a permanent place in popular regard. John 
Howard Payne, a native of Long Island, a wan- 
dering actor and playwright, who died American 
Consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for 
Covent Garden Theater an opera, entitled Claris 
the libretto of which included the now famous 
song of Home^ Sweet Ho7ne. Its literary pretensions 
were of the humblest kind, but it spoke a true word 
which touched the Anglo-Saxon heart in its ten- 
derest spot, and being happily married to a plaint- 
ive air was sold by the hundred thousand, and is 
evidently destined to be sung forever. A like 
success has attended the Old Oaken Bucket, com- 
posed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and jour- 
nalist from Massachusetts, whose other poems, 
of which two collections were issued in 1818 and 
1826, were soon forgotten. Richard Henry Wilde, 
an Irishman by birth, a gentleman of scholarly 
tastes and accomplishments, who wrote a great 
deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms 
in Congress as Representative of the State of 
Georgia, was the author of the favorite song, My 
Life is Like the Summer Rose. Another South- 



The Era of National Expansion. 109 

erner, and a member of a distinguished Southern 
family, was Edward Coate5*Pinkney, who served 
nine years in the navy, and died in 1828, at the 
age of twenty-six, having published in 1825 a 
small volume of lyrical poems which had a fire 
and a grace uncommon at that time in American 
verse. One of these, A Healthy beginning 

" I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone," 

though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar 
Poe, has rare beauty of thought and expression. 
John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United 
States (1825-29), was a man of culture and of liter- 
ary tastes. He published his lectures on rhetoric 
delivered during his tenure of the Boylston Profes- 
sorship at Harvard in 1806-09; he left a volumi- 
nous diary, which has been edited since his death 
in 1848; and among his experiments in poetry is 
one of considerable merit, entitled the Wants of 
Man, an ironical sermon on Goldsmith's text : 

" Man wants but little here below 
Nor wants that little long." 

As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of 
Dr. Holmes's Contentment^ so the very popular 
ballad. Old Gritnes, written about 1818, by Albert 
Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown Uni- 
versity in Rhode Island, is in some respects an 
anticipation of Holmes's quaintly pathetic Last 
Leaf. 

The p'olitical literature and public oratory of 



no American Literature. 

the United States during this period, although not 
absolutely of less importance than that which 
preceded and followed the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and the adoption of the Constitution, 
demands less relative attention in a history of lit- 
erature by reason of the growth of other depart- 
ments of thought. The age was a political one, 
but no longer exclusively political. The debates 
of the time centered about the question of *' State 
Rights," and the main forum of discussion was the 
old Senate chamber, then made illustrious by the 
presence of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. The 
slavery question, which had threatened trouble, 
w^as put off for awhile by the Missouri Compro- 
mise of 1820, only to break out more fiercely in 
the debates on the Wilmot Proviso, and the 
Kansas and Nebraska Bill. Meanwhile the Aboli- 
tion movement had been transferred to the press 
and the platform. Garrison started his Liberator 
in 1830, and the Antislavery Society was founded 
in 1833. The Whig party, w^hich had inherited 
the constitutional principles of the old Federal 
party, advocated internal improvements at na- 
tional expense and a high protective tariff. The 
State Rights party, which was strongest at the 
South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South 
Carolina claimed the right to "nullify " the tariff im- 
posed by the general government. The leader of 
this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Car- 
olinian, who in his speech in the United States Sen- 
ate, on February 13, 1832, on Nullification and the 



The Era of National Expansion, hi 

Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively the " Caro- 
lina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but 
hardly a great orator. His speeches are the argu- 
ments of a lawyer and a strict constitutionalist, 
severely logical, and with a sincere conviction in 
the soundness of his case. Their language is free 
from bad rhetoric; the reasoning is cogent, but 
there is an absence of emotion and imagination ; 
they contain few quotable things, and no passages 
of commanding eloquence, such as strew the ora- 
tions of Webster and Burke. They are not, in 
short, literature. Again, the speeches of Henry 
Clay, of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose 
persuasive oratory is a matter of tradition, dis- 
appoint in the reading. The fire has gone out of 
them. 

Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of 
American forensic orators, if, indeed, he be not the 
greatest of all orators wlio have used the English 
tongue. Webster's speeches are of the kind that 
have power to move after the voice of the speaker 
is still. The thought and the passion in them lay 
hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than 
the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of 
Webster's speeches, as of all speeches, that they 
are knovvn to posterity more by single brilliant 
passages than as wholes. In oratory the occasion 
is of the essence of the thing, and only those parts 
of an address which are permanent and universal 
in their appeal take their place in literature. But 
of such detachable passages there are happily 



112 American Literature. 

many in Webster's orations. One great thought un- 
derhiy all his public life, the thought of the Union; 
of American nationality. What in Hamilton had 
been a principle of political philosophy had be- 
come in Webster a passionate conviction. The 
Union was his idol, and he was intolerant of any 
faction which threatened it from any quarter, 
whether the Nullifiers of South Carolina or the 
Abolitionists of the North. It is this thought 
which gives grandeur and elevation to all his ut- 
terances, and especially to the wonderful perora- 
tion of his reply to Hayne, on Mr. Foot's resolu- 
tion touching the sale of the public lands, delivered 
in the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing 
words, "liberty and union, now and forever, one 
and inseparable," became the rallying cry of a great 
cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous 
speech of March 7, 1850, On the Constitution and 
the Union, which gave so much offense to the ex- 
treme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison 
that a Constitution which protected slavery was "a 
league with death and a covenant with hell." It is 
not claiming too much for Webster to assert that 
the sentences of these and other speeches, memo- 
rized and declaimed by thousands of school-boys 
throughout the North, did as much as any single 
influence to train up a generation in hatred of 
secession, and to send into the fields of the civil 
war armies of men animated with the stern reso- 
lution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed, 
rather than allow the Union to be dissolved. 



The Era of National Expansion. 113 

The figure of this great senator is one of the 
most imposing in American annals. The mascu- 
line force of his personality impressed itself upon 
men of a very different stamp — upon the unworldly 
Emerson, and upon the captious Carlyle, whose 
respect was not willingly accorded to any con- 
temporary, much less to a representative of Amer- 
ican democracy. Webster's looks and manner 
were characteristic. His form was massive, his 
skull and jaw solid, the underlip projecting, and 
the mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion 
was swarthy, and his black, deep set eyes, under 
shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering fire. 
He was rather silent in society ; his delivery in 
debate was grave and weighty, rather than fervid. 
His oratory was massive and sometimes even pon- 
derous. It may be questioned whether an Amer- 
ican orator of to-day, with intellectual abilities 
equal to Webster's — if such a one there were — 
would permit himself the use of sonorous and 
elaborate pictures like the famous period which 
follows: ''On this question of principle, while 
actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their 
flag against a power, to wdiich, for purposes of 
foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the 
height of her glory, is not to be compared; a 
power which has dotted over the surface of the 
whole globe with her possessions and military posts, 
whose morning drum-beat, following the sun and 
keeping company with the hours, circles the earth 
wdth one continuous and unbroken strain of the 
8 



114 American Literature. 

martial airs of England." The secret of this kind 
of oratory has been lost. The present generation 
distrusts rhetorical ornament, and likes something 
swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speakers. 
Bat every thing, in declamation of this sort, de- 
pends on the way in which it is done. Webster 
did it supremely well ; a smaller man would mere- 
ly have made buncombe of it. 

Among the legal orators of the time the fore- 
most was Rufus Choate, an eloquent pleader, and, 
like Webster, a United States Senator from Mas- 
sachusetts. Some of his speeches, though exces- 
sively rhetorical, have literary quality, and are 
nearly as effective in print as Webster's own. An- 
other Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who 
in his time was successively professor in Harvard 
College, Unitarian minister in Boston, editor of the 
North American Revieiu, member of both houses of 
Congress, Minister to England, Governor of his 
State, and President of Harvard, was a speaker 
of great finish and elegance. His addresses were 
mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and 
were rather lectures and <I>. B. K. prolusions than 
speeches. Everett was an instance of careful 
culture bestowed on a soil of no very great natu- 
ral richness. It is doubtful whether his classical 
orations on Washington, the Republic, Bunker 
Hill Monument, and kindred themes, have enough 
of the breath of life in them to preserve them 
much longer in recollection. 

New England, during these years, did not take 



The Era of National Expansion. 115 

that leading part in the purely literary develop- 
ment of the country which it afterward assumed. 
It had no names to match against those of Irving 
and Cooper. Drake and Halleck — slender as v/as 
their performance in point of quantity — were bet- 
ter poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, 
whose Shakespere Ode, delivered at the Boston 
theater in 1823, was locally famous; and Richard 
^Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem, the 
Buccaneer, 1827, once had admirers. But Boston 
has at no time been without a serious intellectual 
life of its own, nor without a circle of highly edu- 
cated men of literary pursuits, even in default of 
great geniuses. The North American ^Review, 
established in 1815, though it has been wittily de- 
scribed as "ponderously revolving through space " 
for a few years after its foundation, did not exist 
in an absolute vacuum, but was scholarly, if some- 
what heavy. Webster, to be sure, was a Massa- 
chusetts man — as were Everett and Choate — but 
his triumphs were won in the wider field of national 
politics. There was, however, a movement at this 
time in the intellectual life of Boston and Eastern 
Massachusetts, which, though not immediately con- 
tributory to the finer kinds of literature, prepared 
the way, by its clarifying and stimulating influences, 
for the eminent writers of the next generation. This 
was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, 
in which William EUery Channing was the prin- 
cipal leader. In a community so intensely theo- 
logical as New England it was natural that any 



ii6 American Literature. ■ 

new movement in thought should find its point of 
departure in the churches. Accordingly, the pro- 
gressive and democratic spirit of the age, which 
in other parts of the country took other shapes, 
assumed in Massachusetts the form of " liberal 
Christianity." Arminianism, Socinianism, and 
other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine, had been 
latent in some of the Congregational churches" of 
Massachusetts for a number of years. Bui about 
1 812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a 
few years from that date most of the oldest and 
wealthiest church societies of Boston and its 
vicinity had gone over to Unitarianism, and Har- 
vard College had been captured, too. In the 
controversy that ensued, and which was carried 
on in numerous books, pamphlets, sermons, and 
periodicals, there were eminent disputants on both 
sides. So far as this controversy was concerned 
with the theological doctrine of the Trinity, it has 
no place in a history of literature. But the issue 
went far beyond that. Channing asserted the dig- 
nity of human nature against the Calvinistic doc- 
trine of innate depravity, and affirmed the rights 
of human reason and man's capacity to judge of 
God. "We must start in religion from our own 
souls," he said. And in his Moral Argument 
against Calvinism, 1820, he wrote: "Nothing is 
gained to piety by degrading human nature, for in 
the competency of this nature to know and judge 
of God all piety has its foundation." In opposition 
to Edwards's doctrine of necessit}^, he emphasized 



The Era of National Expansion. 117 

the freedom of the will. He maintained that the 
Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, foreordination, 
election by grace, and eternal punishment were 
inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made 
God a monster. In Channing's view the great 
sanction of religious truth is the moral sanction, 
is its agreement with the laws of conscience. He 
was a passionate vindicator of the liberty of the 
individual not only as against political oppression 
but against the tyranny of public opinion over 
thought and conscience : " We were made for free 
action. This alone is life, and enters into all that 
is good and great." This jealous love of freedom 
inspired all that he did and wrote. It led him to 
join the Antislavery party. It expressed itself in 
his elaborate arraignment of Napoleon in the Uni- 
tarian organ, the Christian Examiner^ for 1827-28; 
in his Remarks on Associations^ and his paper On 
the Character and Writings of Joh?i Alilton, 1826. 
This was his most considerable contribution to 
literary criticism. It took for a text Milton's 
recently discovered Treatise on Christian Doctrine 
— the tendency of which was anti-Trinitarian — but 
it began with a general defense of poetry against 
" those who are accustomed to speak of poetry as 
light reading." This would now seem a some- 
what superfluous introduction to an article in any 
American review. But it shows the nature of the 
milieu through which the liberal movement in 
Boston had to make its way. To assert the dig- 
nity and usefulness of the beautiful arts; to show 



ii8 American Literature. 

that novels and plays and games and dances were 
not necessarily sinful, and might even be improv- 
ing, was a part of the work of preparation done by 
the Unitarians in Massachusetts. People in other 
parts of the country had gone freely to the theater 
or the ball. Some people had even done so in 
Boston, but not with the approval of the clergy. 
The narrow traditions of provincial Puritanism 
had to be broken and a more cheerful type of 
religion preached before polite literature in Mas- 
sachusetts could find a congenial atmosphere. In 
Channing's Remarks on National Literature, re- 
viewing a work published in 1823, he asks the 
question, " Do we possess what may be called 
national literature?" and answers it, by implication 
at least, in the negative. That we do now possess 
a national literature, is in great part due to the 
influence of Channing and his associates, although 
his own writings, being in the main controversial 
and, therefore, of temporary interest, may not 
themselves take rank among the permanent treas- 
ures of that literature. 

1. Washington Irving. Knickerbocker's History 
of New York. The Sketch Book. Bracebridge 
Hall. Tales of a Traveler. The Alhambra. Life 
of Oliver Goldsmith. 

2. James Fenimore Cooper. The Spy. The Pilot. 
The Red Rover. The Leather-Stocking Tales. 

3. Daniel Webster. Great Speeches and Ora- 
tions. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co. 1879. 



♦ The Era of National Expansion. 119 

4. William Ellery Channing. The Character 
and Writings of John Milton, The Life and 
Character of Napoleon Bonaparte. Slavery. 
[Vols. I. and II. of the Works of William E. 
Channing. Boston: James Munroe & Co. 1841.] 

5. Joseph Rodman Drake. The Culprit Fay. 
The American Flag. [Selected Poems. New York. 

1835] 

6. Fitz-Greene Halleck. Marco Bozzaris. Aln- 
wick Castle. On the Death of Drake. [Poems. 
New York 1827.] 



I20 American Literature. 



CHAPTER IV. 
THE CONCORD WRITERS. 

1837-1861. 

There has been but one movement in the his- 
tory of the American mind which has given to 
literature a group of writers having coherence 
enough to merit the name of a school. This was 
the great humanitarian movement, or series of 
movements, in New England, which, beginning in 
the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later 
phase in Transcendentalism, and spent its last 
strength in the antislavery agitation and the 
enthusiasms of the Civil War. The second stage 
of this intellectual and social revolt was Transcen- 
dentalism, of which Emerson wrote, in 1842: " The 
history of genius and of religion in these times 
will be the history of this tendency." It culmi- 
nated about 1840-41 in the establishment of the 
Dial and the Brook Farm Community, although 
Emerson had given the signal a few years before in 
his little volume entitled Nature^ 1836, his Phi- 
Beta Kappa address at Harvard on the A7nerican 
Scholar, 1837, and his address in 1838 before the 
Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Em- 
erson ( 1 803-1 882) was the prophet of the sect, and 



The Concord Writers. 121 

Concord was its Mecca; but the influence of the 
new ideas was not confined to the little group of 
professed Transcendentalists ; it extended to all 
the young writers within reach, who struck their 
roots deeper into the soil that it had loosened and 
freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not 
merely Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and 
Thoreau, but Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and 
Holmes. 

In its strictest sense Transcendentalism was a 
restatement of the idealistic philosophy, and an 
application of its beliefs to religion, nature, and 
life. But in a looser sense, and as including the 
more outward manifestations which drew popular 
attention most strongly, it was the name given to 
that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal in- 
quiry and experiment, which marked the third 
and fourth decades of this century in America, 
and especially in New England. The movement 
was contemporary with political revolutions in 
Europe and with the preaching of many novel gos- 
pels in religion, in sociology, in science, education, 
medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, 
like the Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritual- 
ists, Millerites, Second Adventists, Shakers, Mor- 
mons, and Come-outers, same of whom believed 
in trances, miracles, and direct revelations from 
the divine Spirit; others in the quick coming of 
Christ, as deduced from the opening of the seals 
and the number of the beast in the Apocalypse ; 
and still others in the reorganization of society and 



122 American Literature. 

of the family on a different basis. New systems 
of education were tried, suggested by the writings 
of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. 
The pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phre- 
nology, as taught by Gall and Spurzheim, had 
numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy, 
hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls " kindred 
delusions," made many disciples. Numbers of 
persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham 
and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal 
food, as injurious not only to health but to a finer 
spirituality. Not a few refused to vote or pay 
taxes. The writings of Fourier and St. Simon 
were translated, and societies were established 
where co-operation and a community of goods 
should take the place of selfish competition. 

About the year 1840 there were some thirty of 
these "' phalansteries " in America, many of which 
had their organs in the shape of weekly or monthly 
journals, which advocated the principle of Asso- 
ciation. The best known of these was probably 
the Harhiugei', the mouth -piece of the famous 
Brook Farm Community, which was founded at 
West Roxbury, Mass., in i84i,and lasted till 1847. 
The head man of Brook Farm was George Ripley, 
a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pul- 
pit in Boston to go into the movement, and who 
after its failure became and remained for many 
years literary editor of the New York Tribune. 
Among his associates were Charles A. Dana — now 
the editor of the Sun — Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel 



The Concord Writers. 123 

Hawthorne and others not unknown to fame. 
The Harbinger^ which ran from 1845 to 1849 — two 
years after the break up of the community— had 
among its contributors many who were not Brook 
Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with 
the experiment. Of the number were Horace 
Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge — who did so much to 
introduce American readers to German literature 
— J. S. Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, 
the poet, and younger men, like G. W. Curtis, and 
T. W. Higginson. A reader of to-day, looking 
into an odd volume of the Hai'binger^ will find in 
it some stimulating writing, together with a great 
deal of unintelligible talk about " Harmonic 
Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters 
now fallen silent. The most important literary 
result of this experiment at " plain living and high 
thinking," with its queer mixture of culture and 
agriculture, was Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance^ 
which has for its background an idealized picture 
of the community life, whose heroine, Zenobia, 
has touches of Margaret Fuller ; and whose hero, 
vv^ith his hobby of prison reform, was a type of 
the one-idead philanthropists that abounded in 
such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was 
always in part one of reserve and criticism, an 
attitude which is apparent in the reminiscences of 
Brook Farm in his American Note Books ^ wherein 
he speaks witli a certain resentment of " Miss 
Fuller's transcendental heifer," which hooked 
the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's 



124 AxMERiCAN Literature. 

mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Ful- 
ler herself. 

It was the day of seers and *' Orphic " utter- 
ances ; the air was full of the enthusiasm of hu- 
manity and thick with philanthropic projects and 
plans for the regeneration of the universe. The 
figure of the wild-eyed, long-haired reformer — the 
man with a panacea — the " crank " of our later 
terminology — became a familiar one. He abound- 
ed at non-resistance conventions and meetings 
of universal peace societies and of woman's 
rights associations. The movement had its 
grotesque aspects, which Lowell has described in 
his essay on Thoreau. " Bran had its apostles 
and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its mar- 
tyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar- pot. . . . Not 
a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money 
(unless earned by other people), professing to live 
on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . . Com- 
munities were established where every thing was 
to be common but common sense." 

This ferment has long since subsided and much 
of what was then seething has gone off in vapor or 
other volatile products. But some very solid mat- 
ters also have been precipitated, some crystals of 
poetry translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The 
immediate practical outcome was disappointing, 
and the external history of the agitation is a 
record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, 
L^topian philosophies, and sects founded only to 
dwindle away or be reabsorbed into some form of 



The Concord Writers. 125 

orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the 
worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could 
not understand the enigmatic utterances of the re- 
formers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides of tran- 
scendentalism were naturally uppermost. Never- 
theless the movement was but a new avatar of the 
old Puritan spii-it; its moral earnestness, its spirit- 
uality, its tenderness for the individual con- 
science. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into 
grotesque extremes. Emerson bore about the 
same relation to the absurder outcroppings of 
transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New 
Lights, Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his 
time. There is in him that mingling of idealism 
with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee shrewd- 
ness, which characterizes the race. The practical, 
inventive, calculating, money-getting side of the 
Yankee has been made sufficiently obvious. But 
the deep heart of New England is full of dreams, 
mysticism, romance : 

"And in the day of sacrifice, 

When heroes piled the pyre, 
The dismal Massachusetts ice 

Burned more than others' fire." 

The one element which the odd and eccentric 
developments of this movement shared in common 
with the real philosophy of transcendentalism was 
the rejection of authority and the appeal to the pri- 
vate consciousness as the sole standard of truth and 
right. This principle certainly lay in the ethical 



126 American Literature. 

systems of Kant and Fichte, the great transcend- 
entalists of Germany. It had been strongly as- 
serted by Channing. Nay, it was the starting 
point of Puritanism itself, which had drawn away 
from the ceremonial religion of the English Church 
and by its Congregational system had made each 
church society independent in doctrine and wor- 
ship. And although Puritan orthodoxy in New 
England had grown rigid and dogmatic, it had 
never used the weapons of obscurantism. By en- 
couraging education to the utmost it had shown 
its willingness to submit its beliefs to the fullest 
discussion and had put into the hands of dissent 
the means with which to attack them. 

In its theological aspect transcendentalism was 
a departure from conservative Unitarianism, as 
that had been from Calvinism. From Edwards to 
Channing, from Channing to Emerson and Theo- 
dore Parker, there was a natural and logical unfold- 
ing. Not logical in the sense that Channing ac- 
cepted Edwards' premises and pushed them out to 
their conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of 
Channing's premises, but in the sense that the rigid 
pushing out of Edwards' premises into their con- 
clusions by himself and his followers had brought 
about a moral i-edudio ad ahsurdum and a state of 
opinion against which Channing rebelled; and 
that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped 
short in the carrying out of his own principles. 
Thus the "Channing Unitarians," while denying 
that Christ was God, had held that he was of di- 



The Concord Writers. 127 

vine nature, was the Son of God, and had existed 
before he came into the world. While rejecting 
the doctrine of the " Vicarious sacrifice " they 
maintained that Christ was a mediator and inter- 
cessor, and that his supernatural nature was testi- 
fied by miracles. For Parker and Emerson it was 
easy to take the step to the assertion that Christ 
was a good and great man, divine only in the sense 
that God possessed him more fully than any other 
man known in history ; that it was his preaching 
and example that brought salvation to men, and 
not any special mediation or intercession, and that 
his own words and acts, and not miracles, are 
the only and the sufficient witness to his mission. 
In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as 
human as Buddha, Socrates or Confucius, and the 
Bible was but one among the " Ethnical Script- 
ures " or sacred writings of the peoples, passages 
from which were published in the transcendental 
organ, the Dial. As against these new views 
Channing Unitarianism occupied already a con- 
servative position. The Unitarians as a body 
had never been very numerous outside of 
Eastern Massachusets. They had a few churches 
in New York and in the larger cities and 
towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such, was a local 
one. Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against tlie 
heresy, under leaders like Leonard Woods and 
Moses Stuart, of Andover, and Lyman Beecher, 
of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of Con- 
necticut, for example, there was until lately, for 



128 American Literature. 

a period of several years, no distinctly Unitarian 
congregation worshiping in a church edifice of its 
own. On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed, 
with justice, that their opinions had to a great 
extent modified the theology of the orthodox 
churches. The writings of Horace Bushnell, of 
Hartford, one of the most eminent Congregational 
divines, approach Unitarianism in their interpreta- 
tion of the doctrine of the Atonement; and the 
" progressive orthodoxy " of Andover is certainly 
not the Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jona- 
than Edwards. But it seemed to the transcend- 
entalists that conservative Unitarianism was too 
negative and "cultured," and Margaret Fuller 
complained of the coldness of the Boston pulpits. 
While contrariwise the central thought of tran- 
scendentalism, that the soul has an immediate 
connection with God, was pronounced by Dr. 
Channing a "crude speculation." This was the 
thought of Emerson's address in 1838 before the 
Cambridge Divinity School, and it was at once 
made the object of attack by conservative Uni- 
tarians like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. 
The latter in an address before the same audience, 
on the Latest Form of Infidelity^ said : " Nothing 
is left that can be called Christianity if its miracu- 
lous character be denied. . . . There can be no 
intuition, no direct perception of the truth of 
Christianity." And in a pamphlet supporting the 
same side of the question he added : " It is not an 
intelligible error but a mere absurdity to maintain 



The Concord Writers. 129 

that we are conscious, or have an intuitive knowl- 
edge, of the being of God, of our own immortality 
. . . or of any other fact of religion," Ripley 
and Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but 
Emerson himself would never be drawn into con- 
troversy. He said that he could not argue. He 
announced truths ; his method was that of the seer, 
not of the disputant. In 1832 Emerson, who was 
a Unitarian clergyman, and descended from eight 
generations of clergymen, had resigned the pas- 
torate of the Second Church of Boston because 
he could not conscientiously administer the sacra- 
ment of the communion — which he regarded as a 
mere act of commemoration — in the sense in which 
it was understood by his parishioners. Thence- 
forth, though he sometimes occupied Unitarian 
pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of '' lay 
preacher," he never assumed the pastorate of a 
church. The representative of transcendentalism 
in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, an eloquent 
preacher, an eager debater and a prolific writer on 
many subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen 
volumes. Parker was a man of strongly human 
traits, passionate, independent, intensely relig- 
ious, but intensely radical, who made for him- 
self a large personal following. The more ad- 
vanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after 
him, " Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian 
churches refused to *' fellowship " with him; and 
the large congregation, or audience, which as- 
sembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was 
9 



130 American Literature. 

stigmatized as a " boisterous assembly " which 
came to hear Parker preach irreligion. 

It has been said that, on its philosophical side, 
New England transcendentalism was a restate- 
ment of idealism. The impulse came from Ger- 
many, from the philosophical writings of Kant, 
Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling, and from the works 
of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had domesticated 
German thought in England. In Channing's Re- 
marks on a National Literature^ quoted in our last 
chapter, the essayist urged that our scholars should 
study the authors of France and Germany as one 
means of emancipating American letters from a 
slavish dependence on British literature. And 
in fact German literature began, not long after, 
to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson 
published an American edition of Carlyle's Mis- 
cellanies^ including his essays on German writers 
that had appeared in England between 1822 and 
1830. In 1838 Ripley began to publish Specimens 
of Foreign Standard Literature^ which extended 
to fourteen volumes. In his work of translating 
and supplying introductions to the matter selected 
he was helped by Ripley, Margaret Fuller, John 
S. Dwight and others who had more or less con- 
nection with the transcendental movement. 

The definition of the new faith given by Emer- 
son in his lecture on the Transcendentalist, 1842, is 
as follows: '^ What is popularly called transcend- 
entalism among us is idealism. . . . The idealism 
of the present day acquired the name of transcend- 



The Concord Writers. 131 

ental from the use of that term by Immanuel 
Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of 
Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in 
the intellect which was not previously in the ex- 
perience of the senses, by showing that there was a 
very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, 
which did not come by experience, but through 
which experience was acquired ; that these were 
intuitions of the mind itself, and he denominated 
them tra?iscendenial forms." Idealism denies the 
independent existence of matter. Transcendent- 
alism claims for the innate ideas of God and the 
soul a higher assurance of reality than for the 
knowledge of the outside world derived through 
the senses. Emerson shares the "noble doubt" 
of idealism. He calls the universe a shade, a 
dream, " this great apparition." " It is a sufficient 
account of that appearance we call the world," he 
wrote in Nature, " that God will teach a human 
mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain 
number of congruent sensations which we call sun 
and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In 
my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the 
report of my senses, to know whether the im- 
pressions on me correspond with outlying objects, 
what difference does it make whether Orion is up 
there in heaven or some god paints the image in 
the firmament of the soul ? " On the other hand 
our evidence of the existence of God and of our 
own souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, 
are immediate, and are independent of the senses. 



132 



American Literature. 



We are in direct communication with the "Over- 
soul," the infinite Spirit. " The soul in man is 
the background of our being — an immensity not 
possessed, that cannot be possessed." " From 
within or from behind a light shines through us 
upon things, and makes us aware that we are 
nothing, but the light is all." Revelation is *'an 
influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an 
ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing 
surges of the sea of life." In moods of exaltation, 
and especially in the presence of nature, this con- 
tact of the individual soul with the absolute is felt. 
"All mean egotism vanishes. I become a trans- 
parent eyeball ; I am nothing ; I see all ; the cur- 
rents of the Universal Being circulate through me; 
I am part and particle of God." The existence 
and attributes of God are not deducible from his- 
tory or from natural theology, but are thus directly 
given us in consciousness. In his essay on the 
Transceiidentalist^ Emerson says : " His experience 
inclines him to behold the procession of facts you 
call the world as flowing perpetually outward from 
an invisible, unsounded center in himself; center 
alike of him and of them and necessitating him to 
regard all things as having a subjective or relative 
existence — relative to that aforesaid Unknown 
Center of him. There is no bar or wall in the 
soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the 
cause, begins. We lie open on one side to the 
deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of 
God." 



The Concord Writers. 133 

Emerson's point of view, though familiar to 
students' of philosophy, is strange to the popular 
understanding, and hence has arisen the complaint 
of his obscurity. Moreover, he apprehended and 
expressed these ideas as a poet, in figurative and 
emotional language, and not as a metaphysician, in 
a formulated statement. His own position in rela- 
tion to systematic philosophers is described in 
what he says of Plato, in his series of sketches en- 
titled Representative Men, 1850 : " He has not a 
system. The dearest disciples and defenders are 
at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, 
and his theory is not complete or self-evident. 
One man thinks he means this, and another that ; 
he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse 
of it in another place." It happens, therefore, that, 
to many students of more formal philosophies 
Emerson's meaning seems elusive, and he appears 
to write from temporary moods and to contradict 
himself. Had he attempted a reasoned exposition 
of the transcendental philosophy, instead of writ- 
ing essays and poems, he might have added one 
more to the number of system-mongers ; but he 
would not have taken that significant place which 
he occupies in the general literature of the time, 
nor exerted that wide influence upon younger 
writers which has been one of the stimulating 
forces in American thought. It was because Em- 
erson was a poet that he is our Emerson. And 
yet it would be impossible to disentangle his pe- 
culiar philosophical ideas from the body of his 



134 American Literature. 

writings and to leave the latter to stand upon tlieir 
merits as literature merely. He is the poet of 
certain high abstractions, and his religion is central 
to all his work — excepting, perhaps, his English 
Traits, 1856, an acute study of national charac- 
teristics, and a few of his essays and verses, which 
are independent of any particular philosophical 
standpoint. 

When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832 he 
made a short trip to Europe, where he visited Car- 
lyle at Craigenputtoch, and Landor at Florence, On 
his return he retired to his birthplace, the village 
of Concord, Massachusetts,and settled down among 
his books and his fields, becoming a sort of "glori- 
fied farmer," but issuing frequently from his retire- 
ment to instruct and delight audiences of thought- 
ful people at Boston and at other points all through 
the country. Emerson was the perfection of a ly- 
ceum lecturer. His manner was quiet but forcible* 
his voice of charming quality, and his enunciation 
clean cut and refined. The sentence was his unit 
in composition. His lectures seemed to begin any- 
where and to end anywhere, and to resemble strings 
of exquisitely polished sayings rather than continu- 
ous discourses. His printed essays, with unimpor- 
tant exceptions, were first written and delivered as 
lectures. In 1836 he published his first book, iV^/- 
ure, which remains the most systematic statement 
of his philosophy. It opened a fresh spring-head in 
American thought, and the words of its introduc- 
tion announced that its author had broken with 



The Concord Writers. 135 

the past. '' Why should not we also enjoy an orig- 
inal relation to the universe ? Why should not we 
have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not 
of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and 
not the history of theirs?" 

It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies 
of this little book. But the year following its pub- 
lication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa address 
at Cambridge, on the Aviericau Scholar^ electrified 
the little public of the university. This is de- 
scribed by Lowell as "an event without any former 
parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always 
treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness 
and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless 
aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, 
what grim silence of foregone dissent ! " To Con- 
cord came many kindred spirits, drawn by Emer- 
son's magnetic attraction. Thither came, from 
Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born a few- 
years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint 
and benignant figure, a visionary and a mystic 
even among the trascendentalists themselves, and 
one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of 
the souk Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, 
Conn., and afterward at Boston on an original 
plan — compelling his scholars, for example, to flog 
him, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flog- 
ging themselves. The experiment was successful 
until his Conversations o?i the Gospels, in Boston, 
and his insistence upon admitting colored children 
to his benches, offended conservative opinion and 



136 American Literature. 

broke up his school. Alcott renounced the eating 
of animal food in 1835. He believed in the union 
of thought and manual labor, and supported him- 
self for some years by the work of his hands, gar- 
dening, cutting wood, etc. He traveled into the 
West and elsewhere, holding conversations on phi- 
losophy, education, and religion. He set up a 
little community at the village of Harvard, which 
was rather less successful than Brook Farm, and he 
contributed Orphic Sayings to the Dialy which were 
harder for the exoteric to understand than even 
Emerson's Brahma or the Oirer-soul. 

Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the 
most intellectual woman of her time in America, 
an eager student of Greek and German litera- 
ture and an ardent seeker after the True, the 
Good, and the Beautiful. She threw herself into 
many causes — temperance, antislavery, and the 
higher education of women. Her brilliant con- 
versation classes in Boston attracted many 
*' minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as lit- 
erary editor of the New York Ti'ibune, she fur- 
nished a wider public with reviews and book- 
notices of great ability. She took part in the 
Brook Farm experiment, and she editad the Dial 
for a time, contributing to it the papers afterward 
expanded into her most considerable book. Woman 
in the Nineteenth Century. In 1846 she went 
abroad, and at Rome took part in the revolution- 
ary movement of Mazzini, having charge of one of 
the hospitals during the &iege of the city by the 



The Concord Writers. 137 

French. In 1847 she married an impecunious 
Italian nobleman, the Marquis Ossoli. In 1850 
the ship on which she was returning to America, 
with her husband and child, was wrecked on Fire 
Island beach and all three were lost. Margaret 
Fuller's collected writings are somewhat disap- 
pointing, being mainly of temporary interest. She 
lives less through her books than through the 
memoirs of her friends, Emerson, James Freeman 
Clarke, T. W. Higginson, and others who knew her 
as a personal influence. Her strenuous and rather 
overbearing individuality made an impression not 
altogether agreeable upon many of her contem- 
poraries. Lowell introduced a caricature of her 
as " Miranda " into his Fable for Critics, and 
Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, preserved in 
the biography written by his son, has given great 
offense to her admirers. ''Such a determination 
to cat this huge universe I " was Carlyle's charac- 
teristic comment on her appetite for knowledge 
and aspirations after perfection. 

To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
who took up his residence there first at the 
"Old Manse," and afterward at " The Wayside." 
Though naturally an idealist, he said that he 
came too late to Concord to fall decidedly under 
Emerson's influence. Of that he would have 
stood in little danger even had he come earlier. 
He appreciated the deep and subtle quality of 
Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius 
always jealously guarded its independence and re- 



138 American Literature. 

sented the too close approaches of an alien mind. 
Among the native disciples of Emerson at Con- 
cord the most noteworthy were Henry Thoreau, 
and his friend and biographer, William EUery 
Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great Channing. 
Channing was a contributor to the Dial^ and he 
published a volume of poems which elicited a 
fiercely contemptuous review from Edgar Poe, 
Though disfigured by affectation and obscurity, 
many of Channing's verses were distinguished by 
true poetic feeling, and the last line of his little 
piece, A Poefs Hope, 

" If my bark sink 'tis to another sea," 

has taken a permanent place in the literature of 
transcendentalism. 

The private organ of the transcendentalists was 
the Dial^ a quarterly magazine, published from 
1840 to 1844, and edited by Emerson and Mar- 
garet Fuller. Among its contributors, besides 
those already mentioned, were Ripley, Thoreau, 
Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles A. Dana, 
John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson 
and William H. Channing, another nephew of Dr. 
Channing. It contained, along with a good deal 
of rubbish, some of the best poetry and prose that 
have been published in America. The most last- 
ing part of its contents were the contributions of 
Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole, it 
is so unique a way-mark in the history of our lit- 
erature that all its four volumes — copies of which 



The Concord Writers. 139 

had become scarce— have been recently reprinted 
in answer to a demand certainly very unusual in 
the case of an extinct periodical. 

From time to time Emerson collected and pub- 
lished his lectures under various titles. A first 
series of £ssays canne out in 1841, and a second in 
1844 ; the Conduct of Life in i860, Society and Soli- 
tude in 1870, Letters and Social Aims, in 1876, and 
^the Fortune of the Republic in 1878. In 1847 he 
issued a volume of Poems, and 1865 Mayday and 
Other Poems. These writings, as a whole, were 
variations on a single theme, expansions and 
illustrations of the philosophy set forth in Nature, 
and his early addresses. They were strikingly 
original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with 
lofty morality and spiritual religion. Emerson, said 
Lowell, first ''cut the cable that bound us to En- 
glish thought and gave us a chance at the dangers 
and glories of blue water." Nevertheless, as it 
used to be the fashion to find an English analogue 
for every American writer, so that Cooper was 
called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney 
was described as the Hemans of America, a well- 
worn critical tradition has coupled Emerson with 
Carlyle. That his mind received a nudge from 
Carlyle's early essays and from Sartor Resai'tus is 
beyond a doubt. They were life-long friends and 
correspondents, and Emerson's Representative Men 
is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's ILero 
Worship. But in temper and style the two writers 
were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and dis- 



I40 American Literature. 

satisfaction with the general drift of things gained 
upon him more and more, while Emerson was a 
consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writ- 
ings published during his life-time, the Fortune of 
the Republic^ contrasts strangely in its hopefulness 
with the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. 
Even in presence of the doubt as to man's per- 
sonal immortality he takes refuge in a high and 
stoical faith. '' I think all sound minds rest on a 
certain preliminary conviction, namely : that if it 
be best that conscious personal life shall continue 
it will continue, and if not best, then it will not ; 
and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see 
that it was better so." It is this conviction tliat 
gives to Emerson's writings their serenity and their 
tonic quality at the same time that it narrows the 
range of his dealings with life. As the idealist de- 
clines to cross-examine those facts which he re- 
gards as merely phenomenal, and looks upon this 
outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy 
to dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away 
his eyes from the evil which he disposes of as 
merely negative, as the shadow of the good. Haw- 
thorne's interest in the problem of sin finds little 
place in Emerson's philosophy. Passion comes 
not nigh him and Faust disturbs him with its dis- 
agreeableness. Pessimism is to him '' the only 
skepticism." 

The greatest literature is that which is most 
broadly human, or, in other words, that which will 
square best with all philosophies. But Emerson's 



The Concord Writers. 141 

genius was interpretive rather than constructive. 
The poet dwells in the cheerful world of phe- 
nomena. He is most the poet who realizes most 
intensely the good and the bad of human life. 
But Idealism makes experience shadowy and sub- 
ordinates action to contemplation. To it the cities 
of men, with their "frivolous populations," 

"... are but sailing foam-bells 
Along thought's causing stream." 

Shakespere does not forget that the world will 
one day vanish " like the baseless fabric of a 
vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff as 
dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in 
which he dwells. Again: while it is for the phi- 
losopher to reduce variety to unity, it is the poet's 
task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In 
the great creative poets, in Shakespere and Dante 
and Goethe, how infinite the swarm of persons, 
the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the 
type is important, the common element. " In youth 
we are mad for persons. But the larger experi- 
ence of man discovers the identical nature appear- 
ing through them all." "The same — the same!" 
he exclaims in his essay on Plato. " Friend and 
foe are of one stuff; the plowman, the plow and the 
furrow are of one stuff." And this is the thought 
in Brahma: 

" They reckon ill who leave me out; 

When me they fly I am the wings: 
I am the doubter and the doubt, 

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." 



142 American Literature. 

It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this 
altitude toward "persons " descending to the com- 
position of a novel or a play. Emerson showed, 
indeed, a fine power of character analysis in his 
English Traits and Representative Men and in his 
memoirs of Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. There 
is even a sort of dramatic humor in his portrait of 
Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway 
between constructive artists, whose instinct it is to 
tell a story or sing a song, and philosophers, like 
Schelling, who give poetic expression to a system 
of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of 
which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English 
example. He set a high value upon Browne, 
to whose style his own, though far more senten- 
tious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, for 
example, "All things are artificial; for nature is the 
art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose work- 
manship, for the rest, in his prose essays was ex- 
ceedingly fine and close. He was not afraid to be 
homely and racy in expressing thought of the 
highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" 
is a good instance of his favorite manner. 

Emerson's verse often seems careless in tech- 
nique. Most of his pieces are scrappy and have the 
air of runic rimes, or little oracular "voicings" — as 
they say in Concord — in rhythmic shape, of single 
thoughts on "Worship," " Character," " Heroism," 
"Art," " Politics," " Culture," etc. The content is 
the important thing, and the fomi is too frequently 
awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the clear- 



The Concord Writers. 143 

obscure of. Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of 
the thought finds its most natural expression in 
the imaginative simplicity of the language. But 
though this artlessness in him became too fre- 
quently in his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery 
Channing, an obtruded simplicity, among his own 
poems are many that leave nothing to be desired 
in point of wording and of verse. His Hymn Sung 
at the Completion of the Concord Monument, in 1836, 
is the perfect model of an occasional poem. Its 
lines were on every one's lips at the time of the 
centennial celebrations in 1876, and " the shot 
heard round the world " has hardly echoed farther 
than the song which chronicled it. Equally cur- 
rent is the stanza from Voluntaries : 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, " Thou must,' 

The youth replies, ' I can.' " 

So, too, the famous lines from the Problem : 

" The hand that rounded Peter's dome. 
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, 
Wrought in a sad sincerity. 
Himself from God he could not free; 
He builded better than he knew; 
The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was 
Henry David Thoreau, "the poet -naturalist." 
After his graduation from Harvard College, in 
1837, Thoreau engaged in school teaching and in 



144 American Literature. 

the manufacture of lead-pencils, but soon gave up 
all regular business and devoted himself to walk- 
ing, reading, and the study of nature. He was at 
one time private tutor in a family on Staten Island, 
and he supported himself for a season by doing 
odd jobs in land surveying for the farmers about 
Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, 
a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near 
Concord, and lived there in seclusion for two 
years. His expenses during these years were nine 
cents a day, and he gave an account of his experi- 
ment in his most characteristic book, Walden^ 
published in 1854. His Week on the Concord and 
Merrimac Rivers appeared in 1849. From time 
to time he went farther afield, and his journeys 
were reported in Cape Cod, the Maine Woods, Ex- 
cursions, and a Yankee in Canada, all of which, as 
well as a volume of Letters diVid. Early Spring in 
Massachusetts, have been given to the public since 
his death, which happened in 1862. No one has 
lived so close to nature, and written of it so inti- 
mately, as Thoreau. His life was a lesson in econ- 
omy and a sermon on Emerson's text, '' Lessen 
your denominator." He wished to reduce exist- 
ence to the simplest terms — to 

" live all alone 
Close to the bone, 
And where life is sweet 
Constantly eat." 

He had a passion for the wild, and seems like 
an Anglo-Saxon reversion to the type of the Red 



The Concord Writers. 145 

Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is 
his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a " per- 
fect piece of stoicism." *' Man," said Thoreau^ 
"is only the point on which I stand." He strove 
to realize the objective life of nature — nature in 
its aloofness from man ; to identify himself, with 
the moose and the mountain. He listened, with 
his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the 
earth. ^UVhat are the trees saying.'" he exclaimed. 
Following upon the trail of the lumberman he 
asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, and 

" saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds. 
The slight liunaea hang its twiu-boiu heads." 

He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to 
fathom the meaning o( the billows on the back of 
Cape Cod, in their indifference to the shipwrecked 
bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in 
my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have 
been out early on a foggy morning and heard the 
cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a 
nature behind the common, unexplored by science 
or by literature. None of the feathered race has yet 
realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland 
depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought 
from their recesses on my comrade*s string, and 
fancied that their plumage would assume stranger 
and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, 
in proportion as I advanced farther into the dark- 
ness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen 
such strong and wild tints on any poet's string." 
10 



146. American Literature.' 

It was on the mystical side that Thoreau appre- 
hended transcendentalism. Mysticism has been 
defined as the soul's recognition of its identity 
with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schel- 
ling's philosophy, and he illustrated it by his famous 
figure of the magnet. Mind and nature are one: 
they are the positive and negative poles of the 
magnet. In man, the Absolute — that is, God — • 
becomes conscious of himself; makes of himself, 
as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The 
souls of men," said Schelling, " are but the in-, 
numerable individual eyes with which our infinite 
World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is 
also clearly present in Emerson's view of nature, 
and has caused him to be accused of pantheism. 
But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the 
underlying principle of the universe is matter or 
force, none of the transcendentalists was a pan- 
theist. In -their view nature was divine. Their 
poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spirit- 
ual reality which abides beyond the phenomena. 
Thus in Emerson's Two Ritrers : 

*' Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,* 

Repeats the music of the rain, 
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit 

Through thee as thou througli Concord plain. 

" Thou in thy narrow banks art pent : 
The stream I love unbounded goes ; 

Through flood and sea and firmament. 

Through light, through life, it forward flows. 

* The Indian name of Concord River. 



The Concord Writers. 147 

** I see the inundation sweet, 

I hear the spending of the stream, 
Through years, through men, through nature fleet. 

Through passion, thought, through power and dream." 

This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The 
hard world of matter becomes suddenly all fluent 
and spiritual, and he sees himself in it — sees God. 
"This earth," he cries, 'Svhich is spread out like 
a map around me, is but the lining of my inmost 
soul exposed." '* In me is the sucker that I see ; " 
and, of Walden Pond, 

" I am its stony shore, 

And the breeze that passes o'er." 

"Suddenly old Time winked at me — ah, you 
know me, you rogue — and news had come that it 
"was well. That ancient universe is in such capital 
health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . 
I see, smell, taste, hear, feel that everlasting 
something to which we are allied, at once our 
maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." 
It was something ulterior that Thoreau sought in 
nature. " The other world," he wrote, " is all my 
art : my pencils will draw no other : my jack- 
knife will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not 
scorn, however, like Emerson, to '' examine too 
microscopically the universal tablet." He was a 
close observer and accurate reporter of the ways 
of birds and plants and the minuter aspects of 
nature. He has had many followers, who have 
produced much pleasant literature on out-door 



148 American Literature. 

life. But in none of them is there that unique 
combination of the poet, the naturalist and the 
mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. 
He had the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye 
of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop 
short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling 
in the Maine woods was to him " as though a door 
had shut somewhere in the damp and shaggy wil- 
derness." He saw small things in cosmic rela- 
tions. His trip down the tame Concord has for 
the reader the excitement of a voyage of explora- 
tion into far and unknown regions. The river 
just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood 
" when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, 
heaving up the surface into dark and sober bil- 
lows," was like Lake Huron, " and you may run 
aground on Cranberry Island," and "get as good a 
freezing there as anywhere on the North-west 
coast." He said that most of the phenomena de- 
scribed in Kane's voyages could be observed in 
Concord. 

The literature of transcendentalism was like the 
light of the stars in a winter night, keen and cold 
and high. It had the pale cast of thought, and 
was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the 
sense of mortal sight." But it was at least in- 
digenous. If not an American literature — not 
national and not inclusive of all sides of Amer- 
ican life — it was, at all events, a genuine New En- 
gland literature and true to the spirit of its section. 
The tough Puritan stock had at last put forth a 



The Concord Writers. 149 

blossom which compared with the warm, robust 
growths of English soil even as the delicate wind 
flower of the northern spring compares with the 
cowslips and daisies of old England. 

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) the 
greatest American romancer, came to Concord. 
He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been 
married, and with his bride he settled down in the 
^' Old Manse " for three paradisaical years. A 
picture of this protracted honeymoon and this 
sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on 
whose banks it was passed, is given in the intro- 
ductory chapter to his Mosses from an Old Manse, 
1846, and in the more personal and confidential 
records of his American Note Books, posthumously 
published. Hawthorne was thirty-eight when he 
took his place among the Concord literati. His 
childhood and youth had been spent partly at his 
birthplace, the old and already somewhat decayed 
sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his grand- 
father's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on 
the edge of the primitive forest. Maine did not 
become a State, indeed, until 1820, the year before 
Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he 
was graduated in 1825, in the same class with 
Henry W. Longfellow and one year behind Frank- 
lin Pierce, afterward President of the United 
States. After leaving college Hawthorne buried 
himself for years in the seclusion of his home at 
Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had 
withdrawn entirely from the world. For months 



150 American Literature. 

at a time Hawthorne kept his room, seeing no 
other society than that of his mother and sisters, 
reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, 
most of which he destroyed as soon as he had 
written them. At twilight he would emerge from 
.the house for a solitary ramble through the streets 
of the town or along the sea-side. Old Salem 
had much that was picturesque in its associations. 
It had been the scene of the witch trials in the 
seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient 
mansions, the homes of retired whalers and India 
merchants. Hawthorne's father had been a ship 
captain, and many of his ancestors had followed 
the sea. One of his forefathers, moreover, had 
been a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in 1691 had 
sentenced several of the witches to death. The 
thought of this affected Hawthorne's imagination 
with a pleasing horror and he utilized it afterward 
in his House of the Seven Gables. Many of the eld 
Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with 
now and then the hint of some obscure crime or 
dark misfortune which haunted posterity with its 
curse till all the stock died out, or fell into poverty 
and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Haw- 
thorne's romance. In the preface to the Marble 
Faun Hawthorne wrote: "No author without a 
trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a ro- 
mance about a country where there is no shadow, 
no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy 
wrong, nor any thing but a commonplace prosper- 
ity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may 



The Concord Writers. 151 

be doubted whether any environment could have 
been found more fitted to his peculiar genius than 
this of his native town, or any preparation better 
calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him 
than these long, lonely years of waiting and brood- 
ing thought. From time to time he contributed 
a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as 
S. G. Goodrich's Annual, the Token, or the Knick- 
erbocker Magazine. Some of these attracted the 
attention of the judicious; but they were anony- 
mous and signed by various noms de plume, and 
their author was at this time — to use his own 
words — " the obscurest man of letters in America." 
In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his 
own expense a short romance, entitled Fanskawe. 
It had little success, and copies of the first edition 
are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published 
a collection of his magazine pieces under the title, 
Twice Told Tales. The book was generously 
praised in the North American Review by his 
former classmate, Longfellow ; and Edgar Poe 
showed his keen critical perception by predicting 
that the writer would easily put himself at the 
head of imaginative literature in America if he 
would discard allegory, drop short stories and 
compose a genuine romance. Poe compared Haw- 
thorne's work with that of the German romancer, 
Tieck, and it is interesting to find confirmation of 
this dictum in passages of the American Note 
Books, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring 
over Tieck with a German dictionary. The 



152 American Literature. 

Tzvice Told Tales are the work of a recluse, who 
makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his 
own heart, acquired by a habit of introspection, 
but who has had little contact with men. Many 
of them were shadowy and others were morbid 
and unwholesome. But their gloom was of an 
interior kind, never the physically horrible of Poe. 
It arose from weird psychological situations like 
that of Ethan Brand in his search for the unpar- 
donable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited 
instinct of Puritanism ; he took the conscience for 
his theme, and in these early tales he was already 
absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways 
in which sin works out its retribution, and the 
species of fate or necessity that the wrong-doer 
makes for himself in the inevitable sequences of 
his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward 
symbols and types, and never quite followed Poe's 
advice to abandon allegory. The Scarlet Letter 
and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly 
allegories, since the characters are men and 
women and not mere personifications of abstract 
qualities. Still they all have a certain allegorical 
tinge. In the Marble Farm, for example, Hilda, 
Kenyon, Miriam and Donatello have been ingen- 
iously explained as personifications respectively 
of the conscience, the reason, the imagination and 
the senses. Without going so far as this, it is pos- 
sible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other cre- 
ations something typical and representative. He 
uses his characters like algebraic symbols to work 



The Concord Wruers. 



^53 



out certain problems with : they are rather more 
and yet rather less than flesh and blood individ- 
uals. The stories in T7C'ice Told Tales and in the 
second collection, Mosses from an Old Afanse, 
1846, are more openly allegorical than his later 
work. Thus the Minister s Black Veil is a sort of 
anticipation of Arthur Dimmesdale in the Scarlet 
Letter. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held the 
position of Surveyor of the Custom House of 
* Salem. In the preface to the Scarlet Letter he 
sketched some of the government officials with 
whom this office had brought him into contact in 
a way that gave some offense to the friends of the 
victims and a great deal of amusement to the 
public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, 
like Irving's, but less genial and with a more 
satiric edge to it. The book last named was writ- 
ten at Salem and published in 1850, just before its 
author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland 
Newport, but then an unfashionable resort among 
the Berkshire hills. Whatever obscurity may have 
hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dis- 
solved by this powerful tale, which was as vivid in 
coloring as the implication of its title. Hawthorne 
chose for his background the somber life of the 
early settlers in New England. He had always 
been drawn toward this part of American his- 
tory, and in Tivice Told Tales had given some 
illustrations of it in Eiidicotfs Red Cross and 
Legends of the Province ILouse. Against this dark 
foil moved in strong relief the figures of Hester 



154 American Literature. 

Prynne, the woman taken in adultery, her para- 
mour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, her husband, 
old Roger Chillingworth, and her illegitimate 
child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the ele- 
mentary passions of human nature and its deep 
and subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the 
heart, this is Hawthorne's greatest book. He 
never crowded his canvas with figures. In the 
Blithedale Romanee and the Marble Faun there 
is the same parti carre ox group of four characters. 
In the House of the Seven Gables there are five. 
The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, 
was of a more subdued intensity than the Scarlet 
Letter^ but equally original and, upon the whole, 
perhaps equally good. The Blithedalt Rouianee, 
published in the same year, though not strik- 
ingly inferior to the others, adhered more to con- 
ventional patterns in its plot and in the sensa- 
tional nature of its ending. The suicide of the 
heroine by drowning, and the terrible scene of the 
recovery of her body, were suggested to the au- 
thor by an experience of his own on Concord 
River, the account of which, in his own words, 
may be read in Julian Hawthorne's Nathaniel 
Hawthorne and His Wife. In 1852 Hawthorne 
returned to Concord and bought the " Wayside " 
property, which he retained until his death. But in 
the following year his old college friend Pierce, now 
become President, appointed him Consul to Liver- 
pool, and he went abroad for seven years. The 
most valuable fruit of his foreign residence was the 



The Concord Writers. 155 

romance of the Marble Faun, i860; the longest of 
his fictions and the richest in descriptive beauty. 
The th.eme of this was the development of the soul 
through the experience of sin. There is a haunt- 
ing mystery thrown about the story, like a soft veil 
of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There 
is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the preter- 
natural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as orig- 
inal as Shakspere's Caliban, or Fouquc's Undine, 
and yet quite on this side the border-line of the 
human. Our Old Home, a book of charming pa- 
pers on England, was published in 1863. Mani- 
fold experience of life and contact with men, 
affording scope for his always keen observation, 
had added range, fullness, warmth to the imagi- 
native subtlety which had manifested itself even 
in his earliest tales. Two admirable books for 
cliildren, the Wonder Book and Tatiglewood Tales, 
in which the classical mythologies were retold,, 
should also be mentioned in the list of Haw- 
thorne's writings, as well as the American, English, 
and Italian Note Books, the first of which contains 
the seed thoughts of some of his finished works, to- 
gether with hundreds of hints for plots, episodes, de- 
scriptions, etc., which he never found time to work 
out. Hawthorne's style, in his first sketches and 
stories a little stilted and "bookish," gradually ac- 
quired an exquisite perfection, and is as well worth 
study as that of any prose classic in the English 
tongue. 

Hawthorne was no transcendentalist, He dwelt 



156 American Literature. 

much in a world of ideas, and he sometimes 
doubted whether the tree on the bank or its image 
in the stream were the more real. But this had 
little in common with the philosophical idealism 
of his neighbors. He reverenced Emerson, and 
he held kindly intercourse — albeit a silent man 
and easily bored — with Thoreau and Ellery Chan- 
ning, and even with Margaret Fuller, But his 
sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in 
the apostles of the new faith. He had little enthu- 
siasm for causes or reforms, and among so many 
Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even 
wrote a campaign life of his friend Pierce. 

The village of Concord has perhaps done more 
for American literature than the city of New York. 
Certainly there are few places where associations, 
both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At 
one side of the grounds of the Old Manse — which 
has the river at its back — runs down a shaded 
lane to the Concord monument and the figure of 
the Minute Man and the successor of " the rude 
bridge that arched the flood." Scarce two miles 
away, among the woods, is little Walden — "God's 
drop." The men who made Concord famous are 
asleep in Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory 
prevails to draw seekers after truth to the Con- 
cord Summer School of Philosophy, which meets 
every year, to reason high of " Go(i, Freedom, and 
Immortality," next-door to the " Wayside," and un- 
der the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne wore a path, 
as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks. 



The Concord Writers. 157 

I Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature. The 
American Scholar. Literary Ethics. The Tran- 
scendentalist. The Over-soul. Address before 
the Cambridge Divinity School. English Traits. 
Representative Men. Poems. 

2. Henry David Thoreau. Excursions. Walden. 
A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. 
Cape Cod. The Maine Woods. 

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mosses from an Old 
Manse. The Scarlet Letter. The House of the 
Seven Gables. The Blithedale Romance. The 
Marble Faun. Our Old Home. 

4. Transcendentalism in New England. By O. 
B. Frothingham. New York : G. P. Putnam's 
Sons. 1875. 



158 American Literature. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS. 

1837-1861. 

With few exceptions, the men who have made 
American literature what it is have been college 
graduates. And yet our colleges have not com- 
monly been, in themselves, literary centers. Most 
of them have been small and poor, and situated in 
little towns or provincial cities. Their alumni 
scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, 
and even those of them who may feel drawn to a 
life of scholarship or letters find little to attract 
them at the home of their a//;ia ma/er, and seek, 
by preference, the large cities where periodicals 
and publishing houses offer some hope of support 
in a literary career. Even in the older and bet- 
ter equipped universities the faculty is usually a 
corps of working scholars, each man intent upon 
his specialty and rather inclined to undervalue 
merely "literary" performance. In many cases 
the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind 
which besets the scholar, the timid conservatism 
which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of 
learning and the spirit of theological conformity 
which suppresses free discussion have exerted their 



The Cambridge Scholars. 159 

benumbing influence upon the originality and cre- 
ative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens 
that, while the contributions of American college 
teachers to the exact sciences, to theology and 
philology, metaphysics, political philosophy and the 
severer branches of learning have been honorable 
and important, they have as a class made little 
mark upon the general literature of the country. 
The professors of literature in our colleges are 
usually persons who have made no additions to 
literature, and the professors of rhetoric seem or- 
dinarily to have been selected to teach students 
how to write, for the reason that they themselves 
have never written any thing that any one has ever 
read. 

To these remarks the Harvard College of some 
fifty years ago offers a striking exception. It was 
not the large and fashionable university that it has 
lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective 
courses, its numerous faculty and its somewhat 
motley collection of undergraduates ; but a small 
school of the classics and mathematics, with some- 
thing of ethics, natural science and the modern 
languages added to its old-fashioned, scholastic 
curriculum, and with a very homogeneous dietitUe, 
drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of 
Eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless a finer in- 
tellectual life, in many respects, was lived at old 
Cambridge within the years covered by this chap- 
ter than nowadays at the same place, or at any 
date in any other American university town. The 



i6o American Literature. 

neighborhood of Boston, where the commercial 
life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual 
as in New York and Philadelphia, has been a 
standing advantage to Harvard College. The 
recent upheaval in religious thought had secured 
toleration, and made possible that free and even 
audacious interchange of ideas without which a 
literary atmosphere is impossible. From these, or 
from whatever causes, it happened that the old 
Harvard scholarship had an elegant and tasteful 
side to it, so that the dry erudition of the schools 
blossomed into a generous culture, and there were 
men in the professors' chairs who were no less 
efficient as teachers because they were also poets, 
orators, wits and men of the world. In the seven- 
teen years from 182 1 to 1839 there were gradu- 
ated from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, 
Sumner, Phillips, Motley, Thoreau, Lowell, and 
Edward Everett Hale, some of whom took up their 
residence at Cambridge, others at Boston and 
others at Concord, whicli was quite as much a 
spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In 
1836, when Longfellow became Professor of 
Modern Languages at Harvard, Sumner was lect- 
uring in the Law School. The following year — 
in which Thoreau took hi^ bachelor's degree — 
witnessed the delivery of Emerson's Phi Beta 
Kappa lecture on the American Scholar in the 
college chapel and Wendell Phillips's speech on 
the Murder of Lovejoy in Faneuil Hall. Lowell, 
whose description of the impression produced by 



The Cambridge Scholars. i6i 

the former of these famous addresses has been 
quoted in a previous chapter, was an undergradu- 
ate at the time. He took his degree in 1838 and 
in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of 
Modern Languages. Holmes had been chosen in 
1847 Professor of Anatomy and Philosophy in the 
Medical School — a position which he held until 
1882. The historians, Prescott and Bancroft, had 
been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. 
The former's first important publication, Ferdinand 
and Isabella, appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been 
a tutor in the college in 1822-23 and the initial 
volume of his Histojy of the United States w^as is- 
sued in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts school 
of historical writers, Francis Parkman, took his first 
degree at Harvard in 1844. Cambridge was still 
hardly more than a village, a rural outskirtof Bos- 
ton, such as Lowell described it in his article, Cam- 
bridge Thirty Years ^igo, originally contributed to 
Putnam's Mojithly in 1853, and afterward reprinted 
in his Fireside Travels^ 1864. The situation of a 
university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an 
almost ideal one. Within easy reach of a great 
city, with its literary and social clubs, its theaters, 
lecture courses, public meetings, dinner parties, 
etc., he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retire- 
ment among elm-shaded avenues and leafy gar- 
dens, the dome of the Boston State-house looming 
distantly across the meadows where the Charles 
laid its "steel blue sickle" upon the variegated, 
plush-like ground of the wide marsh. There was 
11 



i62 American Literature. 

thus, at all times during the quarter of a century 
embraced between 1837 and 1861, a group of 
brilliant men resident in or about Cambridge and 
Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and 
exerting upon one another a most stimulating in- 
fluence. Some of the closer circles — all con- 
centric to the university — of which this group was 
loosely composed were laughed at by outsiders as 
"Mutual Admiration Societies." Such was, for 
instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members 
were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, Professor 
of Greek at Harvard, and afterward president of 
the college ; G. S. Hiilard, a graceful lecturer, 
essayist and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind ; 
and Henry R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover 
of books and a writer of them. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-^1882) the 
most widely read and loved of American poets — or 
indeed, of all contemporary poets in England and 
America — though identified with Cambridge for 
nearly fifty years was a native of Portland, Maine, 
and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the same 
class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 
1825, he had studied and traveled for some years 
in Europe, and had held the professorship of mod- 
ern languages at Bowdoin. He had published sev- 
eral text books, a number of articles on the Romance 
languages and literatures in the North American 
Ranew^ a thin volume of metrical translations from 
the Spanish, a few original poems in various peri- 
odicals, and the pleasant sketches of European 



The Cambridge Scholars. 163 

travel entitled Outre Mer. But Longfellow's 
fame began with the appearance in 1839 of his 
Voices of the Night. Excepting an earlier collec- 
tion by Bryant this was the first volume of real 
poetry published in New England, and it had 
more warmth and sweetness, a greater richness 
and variety than Bryant's work ever possessed. 
Longfellow's genius was almost feminine in its 
flexibility and its sympathetic quality. It readily 
took the color of its surroundings and opened 
itself eagerly to impressions of the beautiful from 
every quarter, but especially from books. This 
first volume contained a few things written during 
his student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank 
verse piece on Autu7nn^ clearly shows the influence 
of Bryant's Thanatopsis. Most of these juvenilia 
had nature for their theme, but they were not so 
sternly true to the New England landscape as 
Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark and the ivy ap- 
pear among their scenic properties, and in the best 
of them. Woods in Winter^ it is the English '* haw- 
thorn " and not any American tree, through which 
the gale is made to blow, just as later Longfellow 
uses " rooks " instead of crows. The young poet's 
fancy was instinctively putting out feelers toward 
the storied lands of the Old World, and in his 
Hymn of the Moravian Nu7is of Bethlehem he 
transformed the rude church of the Moravian 
sisters to a cathedral with "glimmering tapers," 
swinging censers, chancel, altar, cowls and "dim 
mysterious aisle." After his visit to Europe, Long- 



164 American Literature. 

fellow returned deeply imbued with the spirit of 
romance. It was his mission to refine our national 
taste by opening to American readers, in their own 
vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures 
of foreign tongues. The fact that this mission was 
interpretative, rather than creative, hardly detracts 
from Longfellow's true originality. It merely in- 
dicates that his inspiration came to him in the first 
instance from other sources than the common life 
about him. He naturally began as a translator, 
and this first volume contained, among other 
things, exquisite renderings from the German of 
Uhland, Salis, and Miiller, from the Danish, 
French, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon, and a few pas- 
sages from Dante. Longfellow remained all his 
life a translator, and in subtler ways than by direct 
translation he infused the fine essence of European 
poetry into his own. He loved — 

" Tales that have the rime of age 
And chronicles of eld." 

The golden light of romance is shed upon his 
page, and it is his habit to borrow mediaeval and 
Catholic imagery from his favorite middle ages, 
even when writing of American subjects. To him 
the clouds are hooded friars, that " tell their beads 
in drops of rain ; " the midnight winds blowing 
through woods and mountain passes are chanting 
solemn masses for the repose of the dying year, 
and the strain ends with the prayer — 

" Kyrie, eleyson, 
Christe, eleyson." 



The Cambridge Scholars. 165 

In his journal he wrote characteristically : " The 
black shadows lie upon the grass like engravings 
in a book. Autumn has written his rubric on the 
illuminated leaves, the wind turns them over and 
chants like a friar." This in Cambridge, of a 
'moonshiny night, on the first day of the American 
October. But several of the pieces in Voices of 
the Night sprang more immediately from the poet's 
own inner experience. The Hymn to the Night, 
the Psalm of Life, the Reaper and the Flowers, 
Footsteps of Angels, the Light of Stars, and the 
Beleaguered City spoke of love, bereavement, com- 
fort, patience and faith. In these lovely songs 
and in many others of the same kind which he aft- 
erward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all 
his countrymen. America is a country of homes, 
and Longfellow, as the poet of sentiment and of 
the domestic affections, became and remains far 
more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic " 
singer as Whitman, who is still practically un- 
known to the "fierce democracy " to which he 
has addressed himself. It would be hard to over- 
estimate the influence for good exerted by the 
tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality 
which the hundreds of thousands of copies of 
Longfellow's writings, that have been circulated 
among readers of all classes in America and En- 
gland, have brought with them. 

Three later collections. Ballads and Other Poems, 
1842 ; the Belfry of Bruges, 1846 ; and the Seaside 
and the Fireside, 1850, comprise most of what is 



i66 American Literature. 

noteworthy in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first 
of these embraced, together with some renderings 
from the German and the Scandinavian languages, 
specimens of stronger original work than the au- 
thor had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful 
ballads of the Skeleton in Armor and the Wreck 
of the Hesperus. The former of these, written in 
the swift leaping meter of Drayton's Ode to the 
Cainbro Britons on their Harp, was suggested by 
the digging up of a mail-clad skeleton at Fall 
River — a circumstance which the poet linked with 
the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport 
and gave to the whole the spirit of a Norse viking 
song of war and of the sea. The Wreck of the 
Hesperus was occasioned by the. news of ship- 
wrecks on the coast near Gloucester and by the 
name of a reef — " Norman's Woe " — where many 
of them took place. It was written one night be- 
tween twelve and three, and cost the poet, he said, 
"hardly an effort." Indeed, it is the spontaneous 
ease and grace, the unfailing taste of Lonfellow's 
lines, which are their best technical quality. 
There is nothing obscure or esoteric about his 
poetry. If there is little passion or intellectual 
depth, there is always genuine poetic feeling, often 
a very high order of imagination and almost in- 
variably the choice of the right word. In this 
volume were also included the Village Blacksmith 
and Excelsior. The latter, and the Psalm of Life, 
have had a " damnable iteration " which causes 
them to figure as Longfellow's most popular 



• The Cambridge Scholars. 167 

pieces. They are by no means, however, among 
his best. They are vigorously expressed com- 
monplaces of that hortatory kind which passes 
for poetry, but is, in reality, a vague species of 
preaching. 

In the Belfry of Bruges and the Seaside and the 
Fireside, the translations were still kept up, and 
among the original pieces were the Occultatioti 
of Orion — the most imaginative of all Long- 
fellow's poems; Seaweed, which has very noble 
stanzas, the favorite Old Clock on the Stairs, the 
Building of the Ship, with its magnificent closing 
apostrophe to the Union, and the Fire of Drift- 
wood, the subtlest in feeling of any thing that the 
poet ever wrote. With these were verses of a 
more familiar quality, such as the Bridge, Fesig- 
nation, and the Day Is Done, and many others, all 
reflecting moods of gentle and pensive sentiment, 
and drawing from analogies in nature or in legend 
lessons which, if somewhat obvious, were expressed 
with perfect art. Like Keats, he apprehended 
every thing on its beautiful side. Longfellow was 
all poet. Like Ophelia m Hamlet, 

** Thought and affection, passion, hell itself 
He turns to favor and to prettiness.^' 

He cared very little about the intellectual move- 
ment of the age. The transcendental ideas of 
Emerson passed over his head and left him undis- 
turbed. For politics he had that gentlemanly 
distaste which the cultivated class in America had 



i68 American Literature. 

already begun to entertain. In 1842 he printed a 
small volume of Poems on Slavery^ which drew 
commendation from his friend Sumner, but had 
nothing of the fervor of Whittier's or Lowell's ut- 
terances on the same subject. It is interesting to 
compare his journals with Hawthorne's American 
Note Books and to observe in what very different 
ways the two writers made prey of their daily 
experiences for literary material. A favorite 
haunt of Longfellow's was the bridge between 
Boston and Cambridgeport, the same which he put 
into verse in his poem, the Bridge. " I always 
stop on the bridge," he writes in his journal ; 
*'tide waters are beautiful. From the ocean up 
into the land they go, like messengers, to ask why 
the tribute has not been paid. The brooks and 
rivers answer that there has been little harvest of 
snow and rain this year. Floating sea-w^eed and 
kelp is carried up into the meadows, as returning 
sailors bring oranges in bandanna handkerchiefs 
to friends in the country." And again : " We 
leaned for awhile on the wooden rail and enjoyed 
the silvery reflection on the sea, making sundry 
comparisons. Among other thoughts we had this 
cheering one, that the whole sea was flashing with 
this heavenly light, though we saw it only in a 
single track ; the dark waves are the dark provi- 
dences of God ; luminous, though not to us; and 
even to ourselves in another position." '*\Valk on 
the bridge, both ends of which are lost in the fog, 
like human life midway between two eternities; 



The Cambridge Scholars. 169 

beginning and ending in mist." In Hawthorne an 
allegoric meaning is usually something deeper and 
subtler than this, and seldom so openly expressed. 
Many of Longfellow's poems — the Belcaguerea 
City, for example — may be definitely divided into 
two parts; in the first, a story is told or a natural 
phenomenon described ; in the second, the spiritual 
application of the parable is formally set forth. 
This method became with him almost a trick of 
style, and his readers learned to look for the hcEC 
fabula docet at the end as a matter of course. As 
for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's view 
of life — of which the above passage is an instance 
— it seemed to be in him an affair of temperament, 
and not, as in Emerson, the result of philosophic in- 
sight. Perhaps, however, in the last analysis opti- 
mism and pessimism are subjective — the expression 
of temperament or individual experience, since tlie 
facts of life are the same, whether seen through 
Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If 
there is any particular in which Longfellow's inspi- 
ration came to him at first hand and not through 
books, it is in respect to the aspects of the sea. On 
this theme no American poet has written more beau- 
tifully and with a keener sympathy than the author 
of the Wreck of the Hesperus and of Seaweed. 

In 1847 was published the long poem of Evan- 
geline. The story of the Acadian peasant girl, who 
was separated from her lover in the dispersion of 
her people by the English troops, and after weary 
wanderings and a life -long search found him at last, 



lyo American Literature. 

an old man dying in a Philadelphia hospital, was 
told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. L. Conolly. 
who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as 
a subject for a story. Longfellow, characteristic- 
ally enough, " got up " the local color for his poem 
from Haliburton's account of the dispersion of 
the Grand-Pre Acadians, from Darby's Geograph- 
ical Descriptioji of Louisiana and Watson's Amials 
of Fhiladelphia. He never needed to go much 
outside of his library for literary impulse and ma- 
terial. Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's 
inventive powers as a creator of characters or an 
interpreter of American life, his originality as an 
artist is manifested by his successful domestication 
in Evangeline of the dactylic hexameter, which no 
English poet had yet used with effect. The En- 
glish poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a 
time in Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example 
in the use of hexameter in his Bothie of Tober-na- 
Vuolich^ so that we have now arrived at the time — 
a proud moment for American letters — when the 
M'orks of our writers began to react upon the 
literature of Europe. But the beauty of the de- 
scriptions in Evangeline and the pathos — somewhat 
too drawn out — of the story made it dear to a 
multitude of readers who cared nothing about the 
technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to 
whether or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently 
" spondaic" to truthfully represent the quantitative 
hexameters of Homer and Vergil. 

In 1855 appeared Hiawatha^ Longfellow's most 



The Cambridge Scholars. 171 

aboriginal and ^' American " book. The tripping 
trochaic measure he borrowed from the Finnish 
epic Kalevala. Tlie vague, childlike mythology 
of the Indian tribes, with its anthropomorphic 
sense of the brotherhood between men, animals, 
and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from 
Schoolcraft's Algic Researches^ 1839. He fixed 
forever, \w a skillfully chosen poetic form, the more 
inward and imaginative part of Indian character, 
as C'ooper had given permanence to its external 
and active side. Of Longfellow's dramatic experi- 
ments the Golden Legend^ 185 !> alone deserves 
mention here. This was \x\ his chosen realm; a 
tale taken from the ecclesiastical annals of the 
middle ages, precious, with martyrs' blood and 
bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It con- 
tains some of his best work, but its merit is rather 
poetic than dramatic ; although Ruskin praised it 
for the closeness with which it entered into the 
temper of the monk. 

Longfellow has pleased the people more than 
the critics. He gave freely what he had, and the 
gift was beautiful. Those who have looked in his 
poetry for something else than poetry, or for 
poetry of some other kind, have not been slow to 
assert that he was a lady's poet ; one who satisfied 
callow youths and school-girls by uttering com- 
monplaces in graceful and musical shape, but 
who offered no strong meat for men. Miss Fuller 
called his poetry thin and the poet himself a 
"dandy Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, 



172 American Literature. 

or of the best of it. But he had a singing and not 
a talking voice, and in his prose one becomes sen- 
sible of a certain weakness. Hyperion^ for exam- 
ple, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, inter- 
spersed with descriptions of European travel, is, 
upon the whole, a weak book, over flowery in dic- 
tion and sentimental in tone. 

The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a 
translator was his great version of Dante's Divina 
Cof/uficdia, published between 1867 and 1870. It 
is a severely literal, almost a line for line, render- 
ing. The meter is preserved, but the rhyme sac- 
rificed. If not the best English poem constructed 
from Dante, it is at all events the most faithful 
and scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which ac- 
companied it are among Longfellow's best work. 
He seems to have been raised by daily communion 
with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper and 
more subtle thought than is elsewhere common in 
his poetry. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of 
Cambridge and a graduate of Harvard in the class 
of '29 ; a class whose anniversary reunions he 
has celebrated in something like forty distinct 
poems and songs. For sheer cleverness and ver- 
satility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled among 
American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, 
humorist, novelist, essayist and a college lecturer 
and writer on medical topics. Li all of these de- 
partments he has produced work which ranks 
high, if not with the highest His father, Dr. 



The Cambridge Scholars. 173 

Abiel Holmes, was a graduate of Yale and an or- 
thodox minister of liberal temper, but the son 
early threw in his lot with the Unitarians; and, 
as was natural to a man of a satiric turn and with a 
very human enjoyment of a fight, whose youth was 
cast in an age of theological controversy, he has 
always had his fling at Calvinism and has pro- 
longed the slogans of old battles into a later 
generation ; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon 
them rather wearisomely and beyond the limits of 
good taste. He had, even as an undergraduate, a 
reputation for cleverness at writing comic verses, 
and many of his good things in this kind, such as 
the Dorchester Gianf a.nd the Height of the Ridicii- 
lous^ were contributed to the Collegian, a students' 
paper. But he first drew the attention of a wider 
public by his spirited ballad of Old Ironsides — 

"Ay ! Tear her tatlered ensign down ! " — 

composed about 1830, when it was proposed by 
the government to take to pieces the unseaworthy 
hulk of the famous old man-of-war, " Constitution." 
Holmes's indignant protest — which has been a 
favorite subject for school-boy declamation — had 
the effect of postponing the vessel's fate for a great 
many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was 
pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, 
contributing now and then some verses to the 
magazines. Of his life as a medical student in 
Paris there are many pleasant reminiscences in his 
Autocrat and other writings, as where he tells, for 



174 American Literature. 

instance, of a dinner party of Americans in the 
French capital, where one of the company brought 
tears of home-sickness into the eyes of his sodales 
by saying that the tinkle of the ice in the cham- 
pagne-glasses reminded him of the cowbells in 
the rocky old pastures of New England. In 1836 
he printed his first collection of poems. The 
volume contained among a number of pieces 
broadly comic, like the September Gale, the Music 
Grinders, and the Ballad of the Oyster man — which 
at once became widely popular — a few poems of a 
finer and quieter temper, in which there was a 
quaint blending of the humorous and the pathetic. 
Such were My Aunt and the Last Leaf — which 
Abraham Lincoln found "inexpressibly touching," 
and which it is difficult to read without the double 
tribute of a smile and a tear. The volume con- 
tained also Poetry : A Metrical £ssay, read before 
the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society, which was the first of that long line of 
capital occasional poems which Holmes has been 
spinning for half a century with no sign of fatigue 
and with scarcely any falling off in freshness ; 
poems read or spoken or sung at all manner of 
gatherings, public and private ; at Harvard com- 
mencements, class days, and other academic anni- 
versaries; at inaugurations, centennials, dedications 
of cemeteries, meetings of medical associations, 
mercantile libraries, Burns clubs and New En- 
gland societies; at rural festivals and city fairs; 
openings of theaters, layings of corner stones, birlh- 



• The Cambridge Scholars. 175 

day celebrations, jubilees, funerals, commemora- 
tion services, dinners of welcome or farewell to 
Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, 
Grant, Farragut, tiie Grand Duke Alexis, the 
Chinese Embassy and what not. Probably no 
poet of any age or clime has written so much and 
so well to order. He has been particularly happy 
in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big civic 
feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the petit coniite 
— the snug little dinners of the chosen few. His 

"The quaint trick to cram the pithy line 
That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine." 

And although he could write on occasion a So fig 
for a Tempera7ice Dinner^ he has preferred to chant 
the praise of the punch bowl and to 

*' feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing, 
The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling." 

It would be impossible to enumerate the many 
good things of this sort which Holmes has written, 
full of wit and wisdom, and of humor lightly 
dashed with sentiment and sparkling with droll 
analogies, sudden puns, and unexpected turns of 
rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are 
Nux Postcoenatica^ A Modest Request^ Ode for a 
Social Meeting^ The Boys, and Rip Van Winkle, 
M.D. Holmes's favorite measure, in his longer 
poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's exam- 
ple seems to have consecrated forever to satiric 
and didactic verse. He writes as easily in this 



176 American Literature. 

meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's 
epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with 
facility the anapaestics of Moore and the ballad 
stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his 
drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses 
manufactured to pop with the corks and fizz with 
the champagne at academic banquets should much 
outlive the occasion ; or that the habit of produc- 
ing such verses on demand should foster in the 
producer that "high seriousness" which Matthew 
Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. 
Holmes's poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, 
excellent society-verse, but even in its serious 
moments too smart and too pretty to be taken 
very gravely ; with a certain glitter, knowingness 
and flippancy about it ^nd an absence of that self- 
forgetfulness and intense absorption in its theme 
which characterize the work of the higher imagina- 
tion. This is rather the product of fancy and wit. 
Wit, indeed, in the old sense of quickness in the 
perception of analogies is the staple of his mind. 
His resources in the way of figure, illustration, al- 
lusion and anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot 
wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety, 
and there is as much powder in his latest pyro- 
technics as in the rockets which he sent up half 
a century ago. Yet, though the humorist in him 
rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few 
things, like the Chambered Nautilus and Hof7iesick 
in Heaven, which are as purely and deeply poetic 
as the One-Hoss Shay d^Xi^ the Prologue are funny. 



The Cambridge Scholars. 177 

Dr. Holmes is not of the stuff of which idealists 
and enthusiasts are made. As a physician and 
a student of science, the facts of the material uni- 
verse have counted for much with him. His clear, 
positive, alert intellect was always impatient of 
mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the satirist 
and the man of the world for oddities of dress, 
dialect and manners. Naturally the transcend- 
ental movement struck him on its ludicrous side, 
and in his After-Dinner Poem, read at the Phi 
Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge in 1843, he had 
his laugh at the ''Orphic odes" and "runes" of 
the bedlamite seer and bard of mystery 

" Who rides a beetle which he calls a ' sphinx.* 
And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme 
Of Earth the t(»ngueless, and the deaf-mute Time ! 
Here babbling ' Insight' shouts in Nature's ears 
His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres ; 
There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, 
"With ' Wlience am I ? ' and ' Wherefore did I come ? ' " 

Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived 
to write an appreciative life of the poet who wrote 
the Sphinx. There was a good deal of toryism or 
social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged 
a preference for the man with a pedigree, the man 
who owned family portraits, had been brought up 
in familiarity with books, and could pronounce 
"view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the 
*' Brahmin caste of New England " have some- 
times resented as snobbishness Holmes's harping 
12 



178 American Literature. 

on "family," and his perpetual application of cer- 
tain favorite shibboleths to other people's ways of 
speech. *'The woman who calc'lates is lost." 

" Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope 

The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . 

Do put your accents in the proper spot ; 

Don't, let me beg you, don't say ' How? ' for ' What ?' . . . 

The things named 'pants' in certain documents, 

A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'" 

With the rest of " society " he was disposed to 
ridicule the abolition movement as a crotchet of 
the eccentric and the long-haired. But when the 
civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, 
and his own flesh and blood to the cause of the 
Union. The individuality of Holmes's writings 
comes in part from their local and provmcial bias. 
He has been the laureate of Harvard College 
and the bard of Boston city, an urban poet, with 
a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and 
things — the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil 
Hall and King's Chapel and the Old South, Bunk- 
er Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town 
crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful 
saying that " Boston State House is the hub of the 
solar system." 

In 1857 was started the Atlantic Monthly, a 
magazine which has published a good share of the 
best work done by American writers within the past 
thirty years. Its immediate success was assured 
by Dr. Holmes's brilliant series of papers, the 



The Cambridge Scholars. 179 

Autocrat of the Breakfast Table ^ 1858, followed at 
once by the Professor at the Breakfast Table ^ 1859, 
and later by the Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1873. 
The Autocrat is its author's masterpiece, and holds 
the fine quintessence of his humor, his scholarship, 
his satire, genial observation, and ripe experience 
of men and cities. The form is as unique and 
original as the contents, being something between 
an essay and a drama; a succession of monologues 
or table-talks at a typical American boarding- 
house, with a thread of story running through the 
whole. The variety of mood and thought is so 
great that these conversations never tire, and the 
prose is interspersed with some of the author's 
choicest verse. The Professor at the Breakfast 
Table followed too closely on the heels of the Au- 
tocrat^ and had less freshness. The third number 
of the series was better, and was pleasantly reminis- 
cent and slightly garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now 
(1873) sixty-four years old, and entitled to the 
gossiping privilege of age. The personnel of the 
Breakfast Table series, such as the landlady and 
the landlady's daughter and her son, Benjamin 
Franklin ; the schoolmistress, the young man 
named John, the Divinity Student, the Kohinoor, 
the Sculpin, the Scarabaeus and the Old Gentle- 
man who sits opposite, are not fully drawn char- 
acters, but outlined figures, lightly sketched — as is 
the Autocrat's wont — by means of some trick of 
speech, or dress, or feature, but they are quite life- 
like enough for their purpose, which is mainly to 



i8o American Literature. 

furnish listeners and foils to the eloquence and 
wit of the chief talker. 

In i860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of 
fiction with two "medicated novels," Elsie Venner 
and the Guardian Angel. The first of these was 
a singular tale, whose heroine united with her very- 
fascinating human attributes something of the nat- 
ure of a serpent ; her mother having been bitten 
by a rattlesnake a few months before the birth 
of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the 
use of powerful antidotes. The heroine of 
the Guardian Angel inherited lawless instincts 
from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. 
These two books were studies of certain medico- 
psychological problems. They preached Dr. 
Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the 
modified nature of moral responsibility by reason 
of transmitted tendencies which limit the freedom 
of the will. In Elsie Venner^ in particular, the 
weirdly imaginative and speculative character of 
the leading motive suggests Hawthorne's method 
in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary 
figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast 
with this, and gives a kind of doubleness and want 
of keeping to the whole. The Yankee characters, 
in particular, and the satirical pictures of New 
England country life are open to the charge of 
caricature. In the Guardian Angel the figure of 
Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with thor- 
ough sympathy, and though some of his acts are 
improbable he is, on the whole, Holmes's most 



The Cambridge Scholars. i8i 

vital conception in the region of dramatic crea- 
tion. 

James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost 
of American critics and of living American poets^ 
is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, like 
Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 
1855 he succeeded Longfellow as Professor of 
Modern Languages in Harvard College. Of late 
years he has held important diplomatic posts, like 
Everett, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Amer- 
icans distinguished in letters, having been United 
States Minister to Spain, and, under two adminis- 
trations, to the Court of St. James. Lowell is not 
so spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Long- 
fellow. His fame has been of slower growth, 
and his popularity with the average reader has 
never been so great. His appeal has been to the 
few rather than the many, to an audience of 
scholars and of the judicious rather than to the 
"groundlings" of the general public. Neverthe- 
less his verse, though without the evenness, in- 
stinctive grace, and unerring good taste of Long- 
fellow's, has more energy and a stronger intellect- 
ual fiber; while in prose he is very greatly the su- 
perior. His first volume, A Years Life, 1841, 
gave little promise. In 1843 he started a maga- 
zine, the Pioneer, which only reached its third 
number, though it counted among its contributors 
Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and Miss Barrett (after- 
ward Mrs. Browning). A second volume of poems, 
printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, in such 



i82 American Literature. 

pieces as the Shepherd of King Adineius^ Rhoecus, 
a classical myth, told in excellent blank verse, and 
the same in subject with one of Landor's polished 
intaglios; and \\\^ Legend of Britaiuiy^ 2i\idLXXdX\VQ. 
poem, which had fine passages, but no firmness in 
the management of the story. As yet, it was evi- 
dent, the young poet had not found his theme. 
This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War, 
which was unpopular in New England, and which 
the Free Soil party regarded as a slaveholders' war 
waged without provocation against a sister repub- 
lic, and simply for the purpose of extending the 
area of slavery. 

In 1846, accordingly, the Biglow Papers began 
to a.ppear in the Boston Courier, and were collected 
and published in book form in 1848. These were 
a series of rhymed satires upon the government and 
the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and 
supposed to be the work of Hosea Biglow, a home- 
spun genius in a down-east country town, whose 
letters to the editor were indorsed and accom- 
panied by the comments of the Rev. Homer Wil- 
bur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in Jaalam, and 
(prospective) member of many learned societies. 
The first paper was a derisive address to a recruit- 
ing sergeant, with a denunciation of the " nigger- 
drivin' States" and the "northern dough-faces," 
a plain hint that the North would do better to se- 
cede than to continue doing dirty work for the 
South, and an expression of those universal peace 
doctrines which were then in the air, and to which 



The Cambridge Scholars. 183 

Longfellow gave serious utterance in his Occulta- 
tioii of Orion. 

*• Ez for war, I call it murder — 

There you hev it plain an' flat : 
I don't want to go no furder 

Than my Testyment for that ; 
God hez said so plump an' fairly, 

It's ez long as it is broad, 
An' you've gut to git up airly 

Ef you want to take in God." 

The second number was a versified paraphrase of 
a letter received from Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, "a 
yung feller of our town that wuz cussed fool 
enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a drum 
and fife," and who finds when he gets to Mexico 
that 

'* This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin.' " 

Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, 
What Mr. Robinson Thinks, an election ballad, 
which caused universal laughter, and was cm every- 
body's tongue. 

The Biglow Papers remain Lowell's most orig- 
inal contribution to American literature. They 
are, all in all, the best political satires in the lan- 
guage, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yan- 
kee character, with its 'cuteness, its homely wit, and 
its latent poetry. Under the racy humor of the 
dialect — which became in Lowell's hands a me- 
dium of literary expression almost as effective as 



184 American Literature. 

Burns's Ayrshire Scotch — burned that raoral en- 
thusiasm and that hatred of wrong and deification 
of duty — "Stern daughter of the voice of God" — 
which, in the tough New England stock, stands 
instead of the passion in the blood of southern 
races. Lowell's serious poems on political ques- 
tions, such as the Present Crisis^ Ode to Freedom, 
and the Capture of Fugitive Slaves, have the old 
Puritan fervor, and such lines as 

" They are slaves who dare not be 
In the right with two or three," 

and the passage beginning 

*' Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne," 

became watchwords in the conflict against slavery 
and disunion. Some of these were published in 
his volume of 1848 and the collected edition of 
his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These 
also included his most ambitious narrative poem, 
the Vision of Sir Launfal, an allegorical and spir- 
itual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy 
Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric 
and didactic. The merit of Sir Launfal is not in 
the telling of the story, but in the beautiful de- 
scriptive episodes, one of which, commencing, 

" And what is so rare as a day in June ? 
Then if ever come perfect days ; " 

is as current as any thing that he has written. It 
is significant of the lack of a natural impulse to- 



The Cambridge Scholars. 185 

ward narrative invention in Lowell, that, unlike 
Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand 
at a novel. One of the most important parts of a 
novelist's equipment he certainly possesses; name- 
ly, an insight into character, and an ability to de- 
lineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch 
of Parson Wilbur, who edited the Bigloiu Papers 
with a delightfully pedantic introduction, glossary, 
and notes; in the prose essay On a Certain Conde- 
scensio7i in Foreigners^ and in the uncompleted 
poem, Fitz-Adai7is Story. See also the sketch of 
Captain Underbill in the essay on New England 
Tivo Centuries Ago. 

The Big low Papers when brought out in a 
volume were prefaced by imaginary notices of 
the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle, 
and a reprint from the " Jaalam Independent 
Blunderbuss," of the first sketch — afterward ampli- 
fied and enriched — of that perfect Yankee idyl, the 
Courtin. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series 
of Biglow Papers appeared, called out by the 
events of the civil war. Some of these, as, for in- 
stance, Jonathan to John, a remonstrance with En- 
gland for her unfriendly attitude toward the North, 
were not inferior to any thing in the earlier series ; 
and others were even superior as poems, equal 
indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that 
Lowell has written in his professedly serious 
verse. In such passages the dialect wears rather 
thin, and there is a certain incongruity between 
the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power 



iS6 American Literature. 

and the figurative cast of the phrase in stanzas 
like the following : 

" Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth 

Oa war's red techstone rang true metal, 
"Who ventered life an' love an' youth 

For the gret prize o' death in battle ? 
To him who, deadly hurt, agen 

Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 
Tippin' with fire the bolt of men 

That rived the rebel line asunder? " 

Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with 
little sense of humor, wished that the author of the 
Biglow Papers "could have used good English." 
In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English 
adds nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote A 
Fable for Critics^ something after the style of Sir. 
John Suckling's Session of the Poets ; a piece of 
rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the Amer- 
ican Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, 
sharp satire and sound criticism in equal propor- 
tion. Never an industrious workman, like Long- 
fellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait 
for the mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen 
years to go by, from 1850 to 1868, before publish- 
ing another volume of verse. In the latter year 
appeared Ujider the Willows, which contains some 
of his ripest and most perfect work ; notably A 
Winter Evening Hymii to my Fire, with its noble and 
toucliing close — suggested by, perhaps, at any rate 
recalling, the dedication of Goethe's Faust, 

*' Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten; " 



The Cambridge Scholars. 187 

the subtle Footpath and In the Twilight, the love- 
ly little poems Auf Wiedersehen and After the 
Funeral, and a number of spirited political pieces, 
such as Villa Franca, and the Washers of the 
Shroud, This volume contained also his Ode 
Recited at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865. 
This, although uneven, is one of the finest occa- 
sional poems in the language, and the most impor- 
tant contribution which our civil war has made to 
song. It was charged with the grave emotion of 
one who not only shared the patriotic grief and 
exultation of his alma mater in the sacrifice of 
her sons, but who felt a more personal sorrow in 
the loss of kindred of his own, fallen in the front of 
battle. Particularly noteworthy in this memorial 
ode are the tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the third 
strophe, beginning, "Many loved Truth :" the ex- 
ordium — ''O Beautiful! my Country! ours once 
more ! " and the close of the eighth strophe, where 
the poet chants of the youthful heroes who 

"Come transfigured back, 
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, 
Beautiful evermore and with the rays 
Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation." 

From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the Atlantic 
Monthly, and from 1863 to 1872 the North Ameri- 
can Review. His prose, beginning with an early 
volume of Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 
1844, has consisted mainly of critical essays on in- 
dividual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser. 



i88 American Literature, 

Emerson, Shakespere, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, etc., 
together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, 
like Witchcraft^ New England Two Cejituries Ago, 
My Garden Acqiuiintance, A Good Word for Winter, 
Abraham Lincoln, etc., etc. Two volumes of these 
were published in 1870 and 1876, under the title 
Among My Books, and another, Aly Study Win- 
dows, in 1 87 1. As a literary critic Lowell ranks 
easily among the first of living writers. His 
scholarship is thorough, his judgment sure, and 
he pours out upon his page an unwithholding 
wealth of knowledge, humor, wit and imagina- 
tion from the fullness of an overflowing mind. 
His prose has not the chastened correctness and 
*'low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It is rich, ex- 
uberant, and sometimes over fanciful, running 
away into excesses of allusion or following tlie 
lead of a chance pun so as sometimes to lay itself 
open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste. 
Lowell's resources in the way of illustration and 
comparison are endless, and the readiness of his 
wit and his delight in using it put many tempta- 
tions in his way. Purists in style accordingly take 
offense at his saying that " Milton is the only man 
who ever got much poetry out of a cataract, and 
that was a cataract in his eye ; " or of his speak- 
ing of " a gentleman for whom the bottle before 
him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope and 
substituted the Gaston v for the b in binocular," 
which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout 
fashion of telling us that he had drunk so much 



The Cambridge Scholars. 189 

that he saw double. The critics also find fault 
with his coining such words as "undisprivacied " 
and with his writing such lines as the famous one 
— from the Cathedral^ 1870 — 

" Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman." 

It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the 
crowning grace of simplicity, but it is precisely by 
reason of its allusive quality that scholarly readers 
take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has 
stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is 
said in such a way as to recall many other things. 
Mention should be made, in connection with 
this Cambridge circle, of one writer who touched 
its circumference briefly. This was Sylvester Judd, 
a graduate of Yale, who entered the Harvard 
Divinity School in 1837 and in 1840 became min- 
ister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, Maine. 
Judd published several boo«.s, but the only one 
of them at all rememberable was Alaj-garet, 1845, 
a novel of which Lowell said in A Fable for Critics 
that it was *^ the first Yankee book with the soul 
of Down East in it." It was very imperfect in point 
of art, and its second part — a rhapsodical descrip- 
tion of a sort of Unitarian Utopia — is quite un- 
readable. But in the delineation of the few chief 
characters and of the rude, wild life of an outly- 
ing New England township just after the close of 
the revolutionary war, as well as in the tragic 
power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a 
high order. 



190 American Literature. 

As the country has grown older and more popu- 
lous, and works in all departments of thought have 
multiplied, it becomes necessary to draw more 
strictly the line between the literature of knowledge 
and the literature of power. Political history, in 
and of itself, scarcely falls within the limits of this 
sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether dismissed; 
for the historian's art at its highest demands im- 
agination, narrative skill, and a sense of unity 
and proportion in the selection and arrangement 
of his facts, all of which are literary qualities. It 
is significant that many of our best historians 
have begun authorship in the domain of imag- 
inative literature : Bancroft with an early volume 
of poems; Motley with his historical romances 
Merry Moicnt and Mortons Hope\ and Parkman 
with a novel, Vassall Morton. The oldest of that 
modern group of writers that have given America 
an honorable position in the historical literature 
of the world was William Hickling Prescott 
(i 796-1859.) Prescott chose for his theme the 
history of the Spanish conquests in the New 
World, a subject full of romantic incident and sus- 
ceptible of that glowing and perhaps slightly over 
gorgeous coloring which he laid on with a liberal 
hand. His completed histories, in their order, are 
the Reig7i of Ferdinand and Isabella^ 1837; the 
Conquest of Mexico^ 1843 — a topic which Irving 
had relinquished to him ; and the Conquest of Peru, 
1847. Prescott was fortunate in being born to 
leisure and fortune, but he had difficulties of an- 



The Cambridge Scholars. 191 

other kind to overcome. He was nearly blind, 
and had to teach himself Spanish and look up au- 
thorities through the help of others and to write 
with a noctograph or by amanuenses. 

George Bancroft (1800- ) issued the first vol- 
ume of his great History of the United States in 
1834, and exactly half a century later the final 
volume of the work, bringing the subject down to 
1789. Bancroft had studied at Gottingen and 
imbibed from the German historian Heeren the 
scientific method of historical study. He had ac- 
cess to original sources, in the nature of collec- 
tions and state papers in the governmental ar- 
chives of Europe, of which no American had 
hitherto been able to avail himself. His history 
in thoroughness of treatment leaves nothing to be 
desired, and has become the standard authority on 
the subject. As a literary performance merely, 
it is somewhat wanting in flavor, Bancroft's 
manner being heavy and stiff when compared 
with Motley's or Parkman's. The historian's 
services to his country have been publicly recog- 
nized by his successive appointments as Secretary 
of the Navy, Minister to England, and Minister 
to Germany. 

The greatest, on the whole, of American histo- 
rians was John Lothrop Motley (i 814-1877), who, 
like Bancroft, was a student at Gottingen and 
United States Minister to England. His Rise of 
the Dutch Republic^ 1856, and History of the United 
Netherlands, published in installments from 1861 to 



192 American Literature. 

1868, equaled Bancroft's work in scientific thor- 
oughness and philosophic grasp, and Prescott's in 
the picturesque brilliancy of the narrative, while it 
excelled them both in its masterly analysis of great 
historic characters, reminding the reader, in this 
particular, of Macaulay's figure painting, The 
episodes of the siege of Antwerp and the sack of 
the cathedral, and of the defeat and wreck of the 
Spanish Armada, are as graphic as Prescott's fa- 
mous description of Cortez's capture of the city of 
Mexico; while the elder historian has nothing to 
compare with Motley's vivid personal sketches of 
Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Second, Henry of 
Navarre, and William the Silent. The Life of 
John of Barneveld^ j874> completed this series of 
studies upon the history of the Netherlands, a 
theme to which Motley was attracted because the 
heroic struggle of the Dutch for liberty offered, in 
some respects, a parallel to the growth of political 
independence in Anglo-Saxon communities, and 
especially in his own America. 

The last of these Massachusetts historical writ- 
ers whom we shall mention is Francis Parkman 
(1823- ), whose subject has the advantage of being 
thoroughly American. His Oregon Trail, 1847, a 
series of sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain 
life, originally contributed to the Knickerbocker 
Magazine, displays his early interest in the Amer- 
ican Indians. In 185 1 appeared his first historical 
work, the Conspiracy of Fontiac. This has been 
followed by the series entitled Frajice and England 



The Cambridge Scholars. 193 

i7t North America^ the six successive parts of which 
are as follows : the Pioneers of France in the New 
World: the Jesuits in North America: La Salle 
and the Discovery of the Great West : the Old Re- 
gime in Ca?iada : Count Frontenac and New France ; 
and Montcalm and Wolfe. These narratives have a 
wonderful vividness, and a romantic interest not 
inferior to Cooper's novels. Parkman made him- 
self personally familiar with the scenes which he 
'described, and some of the best descriptions of 
American woods and waters are to be found in 
his histories. If any fault is to be found with his 
books, indeed, it is that their picturesqueness and 
"fine writing" are a little in excess. 

The political literature of the years from 1837 
to 1 86 1 hinged upon the antislavery struggle. In 
this "irrepressible conflict" Massachusetts led the 
van. Garrison had written in his Liberator, in 
1830, "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncom- 
promising as justice. I am in earnest ; I will not 
equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a 
single inch; and I will be heard." But the Gar- 
risonian abolitionists remained for a long time, 
even in the North, a small and despised faction. 
It was a great point gained when men of educa- 
tion and social standing like Wendell Phillips 
(1811-1884), and Charles Sumner (1811-1874), 
joined themselves to the cause. Both of these 
were graduates of Harvard and men of scholarly 
pursuits. They became the representative orators 
of the antislavery party, Phillips on the platform 
13 



194 American Literature. 

and Sumner in the Senate. The former first 
came before the public in his fiery speech, deliv- 
ered in Faneuil Hall December 8, 1837, before a 
meeting called to denounce the murder of Love- 
joy, who had been killed at Alton, 111., while de- 
fending his press against a pro-slavery mob. 
Thenceforth Phillips's voice was never idle in 
behalf of the slave. His eloquence was impas- 
sioned and direct, and his English singularly pure, 
simple, and nervous. He is perhaps nearer to 
Demosthenes than any other American orator. 
He was a most fascinating platform speaker on 
themes outside of politics, and his lecture on the 
Lost Arts was a favorite with audiences of all 
sorts. 

Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who 
entered politics reluctantly, and only in obedience 
to the resistless leading of his conscience. He 
was a student of literature and art; a connoisseur 
of engravings, for example, of which he made a 
valuable collection. He was fond of books, con- 
versation, and foreign travel, and in Europe, while 
still a young man, had made a remarkable impres- 
sion in society. But he left all this for public life, 
and in 185 1 was elected, as Webster's successor, to 
the Senate of the United States. Thereafter he 
remained the leader of the Abolitionists in Con- 
gress until slavery was abolished. His influence 
throughout the North was greatly increased by the 
brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 
1856 by " Bully Brooks " of South Carolina. Sum- 



The Cambridge Scholars. 195 

ner's oratory was stately and somewhat labored. 
While speaking he always seemed, as has been 
wittily said, to be surveying a "broad landscape 
of his own convictions." His most impressive 
qualities as a speaker were his intense moral ear- 
nestness and his thorough knowledge of his sub- 
ject. The most telling of his parliamentary 
speeches are perhaps his speech On the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill, of February 3, 1854, and On the 
Crime against Kansas, May 19 and 20, 1856 ; of 
his platform addresses, the oration on the True 
Grandelir of Nations. 

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Voices of the 
Night. The Skeleton in Armor. The Wreck of 
the Hesperus. The Village Blacksmith. The 
Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1846). By 
the Seaside. Hiawatha. Tales of a Wayside 
Inn. 

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table. Elsie Venner. Old Ironsides. 
The Last Leaf. My Aunt. The Music-Grinders. 
On Lending a Punch Bowl. Nux Postcoenatica. 
A Modest Request. The Living Temple. Meet- 
ing of the Alumni of Harvard College. Homesick 
in Heaven. Epilogue to the Breakfast Table Se- 
ries. The Boys. Dorothy. The Iron Gate. 

3. James Russell Lowell. The Biglow Papers 
(two series). Under the Willows and Other 
Poems. 1868. Rhoecus. The Shepherd of King 
Admetus. The Vision of Sir Launfal. The Pres- 



196 American Literature. 

ent Crisis. The Dandelion. The Birch Tree. 
Beaver Brook. Essays on Chaucer : Shakspere 
Once More: Dryden: Emerson: the Lecturer: 
Thoreau : My Garden Acquaintance : A Good 
Word for Winter : A Certain Condescension in 
Foreigners. 

4. William Hickling Prescott. The Conquest 
of Mexico. 

5. John Lothrop Motley. The United Nether- 
lands. 

6. Francis Parkman. The Oregon Trail. The 
Jesuits in North America. 

7. Representative American Orations; volume v. 
Edited by Alexander Johnston. New York : G. 
P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. 



Literature in the Cities. 197 



CHAPTER VI. 
LITERATURE IN THE CITIES. 

1837-1861. 

Literature as a profession has hardly existed 
in the United States until very recently. Even 
now the number of those who support themselves 
by purely literary work is small, although the 
growth of the reading public and the establish- 
ment of great magazines, such as Harper s, the 
Century^ and the Atlantic^ have made a market for 
intellectual wares which forty years ago would 
have seemed a godsend to poorly paid Bohemians 
like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne. 
About 1840 two Philadelphia magazines — Godefs 
Ladys Book and Graham's Moiithly — began to pay 
their contributors twelve dollars a page, a price 
then thought wildly munificent. But the first 
magazine of the modern type was Harpers 
Monthly^ founded in 1850. American books have 
always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from 
the want of an international copyright, which has 
flooded the country with cheap reprints and trans- 
lations of foreign works, with which the domestic 
product has been unable to contend on such un- 
even terms. With the first ocean steamers there 



198 American Literature. 

started up a class of large-paged weeklies in New 
York and elsewhere, such as Brother Jonathan, the 
New World, and the Corsair, which furnished their 
readers with the freshest writings of Dickens and 
Bulwer and other British celebrities within a fort- 
night after their appearance in London. This still 
further restricted the profits of native authors and 
nearly drove them from the field of periodical lit- 
erature. By special arrangement the novels of 
Thackeray and other English writers were printed 
in Harper 5 in installments simultaneously with 
their issue in English periodicals. The Atlantic 
was the first of our magazines which was founded 
expressly for the encouragement, of home talent, 
and which had a purely Yankee flavor. Journal- 
ism was the profession which naturally attracted 
men of letters, as having most in common with 
their chosen work and as giving them a medium, 
under their own control, through which they could 
address the public. A few favored scholars, like 
Prescott, were made independent by the possession 
of private fortunes. Others, like Holmes, Long- 
fellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure 
as they could get in the intervals of an active pro- 
fession or of college work. Still others, like Emer- 
son and Thoreau, by living in the country and 
making their modest competence — eked out in 
Emerson's case by lecturing here and tliere — suf- 
fice for their simple needs, secured themselves 
freedom from the restraints of any regular calling. 
But in default of some such pou sto our men of 



Literature in the Cities. 199 

letters have usually souglit the cities and allied 
themselves with the press. It will be remembered 
that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his 
own account, and that he afterward edited the At- 
lantic and the North American. Also that Ripley 
and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to jour- 
nalism after the break up of the Brook Farm 
Community. 

In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794- 
1878), the earliest American poet of importance, 
whose impulses drew him to the solitudes of na- 
ture, was compelled to gain a livelihood by con- 
ducting a daily newspaper; or, as he himself puts 
it, was 

" Forced to drudge for -the dregs of men, 

And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen." 

Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the 
westernmost county of Massachusetts. After two 
years in Williams College he studied law, and 
practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in 
Plainfield and Great Barrington. Following the 
line of the Housatonic Valley, the social and theo- 
logical affiliations of Berkshire have always been 
closer with Connecticut and New York than with 
Boston and Eastern Massachusetts, Accordingly, 
when, in 1825, Bryant yielded to the attractions of 
a literary career, he betook himself to New York 
city, where, after a brief experiment in conducting 
a monthly magazine, the New York Revieiv and 
Athenceuni, he assumed the editorship of the Even- 



200 American Literature. 

i?ig Fost,Zi Democratic and Free-trade journal, with 
which he remained connected till his death. He 
already had a reputation as a poet when he entered 
the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his 
Thajiatopsishdidi been published in iXiQ North Afner- 
icaii Review^ and had attracted immediate and gen- 
eral admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two 
years before, when the poet was only in his nine- 
teenth year, and was a wonderful instance of pre- 
cocity. The thought in this stately hymn was not 
that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected 
long upon the universality, the necessity, and the 
majesty of death. Bryant's blank verse when at 
its best, as in Thanatopsis and the Forest Hymn^ is 
extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is sur- 
passed by no English blank verse of this century, 
though in rich and various modulation it falls be- 
low Tennyson's Ulysses and Morte d' Arthur. It 
was characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he 
came thus early into possession of his faculty. 
His range was always a narrow one, and about his 
poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rig- 
idity, and solemnity. His fixed position among 
American poets is described in his own Hymn to 
the North Star : 

" And thou dost see them rise, 

Star of the pole ! and thou dost see them set. 
Alone, in thy cold skies, 

Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet. 
Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train, 
Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main." 



Literature in the Cities. 201 

In 1 82 1 he read the ^e-es, a didactic poem in 
thirty-five stanzas, before the Phi Beta Kappa So- 
ciety at Cambridge, and in the same year brought 
out his first volume of poems. A second collec- 
tion appeared in 1832, which was printed in Lon- 
don under the auspices of Washington Irving. 
Bryant was the first American poet who had much 
of an audience in England, and Wordsworth is 
said to have learned Thafiatopsis by heart. Bry- 
ant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Words- 
worth's school, and his place among American 
poets corresponds roughly, though not precisely, 
to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no 
humor, with somewhat restricted sympathies, with 
little flexibility or openness to new impressions, 
but gifted with a high, austere imagination, Bryant 
became the meditative poet of nature. His best 
poems are those in which he draws lessons from 
nature, or sings of its calming, purifying, and 
bracing influences upon the human soul. His 
office, in other words, is the same which Matthew 
Arnold asserts to be the peculiar office of modern 
poetry, "the moral interpretation of nature." 
Poems of this class are Greeji River^ To a Water- 
fowl, June, the Death of the Flowers, and the 
£vemng Wind. The song, "O fairest of the Rural 
Maids," which has more fancy than is common in 
Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, 
has an obvious resemblance to Wordsworth's 
" Three years she grew in sun and shade," and 
both of these nameless pieces might fitly be enti- 



202 American Literature. 

tied — as Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's Golden 
Treasury — *' The Education of Nature." 

Although Bryant's career is identified with New 
York, his poetry is all of New England. His 
heart was always turning back fondly to the woods 
and streams of the Berkshire hills. There was 
nothing of that urban strain in him which appears 
in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, the 
poet of autumn, of the American October and the 
New England Indian Summer, that season of 
" dropping nuts " and " smoky light," to whose 
subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the 
New England disease, consumption, he gave such 
tender expression in the Death of the Flowers ; 
and amid whose ''bright, late quiet," he wished 
himself to pass away. Bryant is our poet of "the 
melancholy days," as Lowell is of June. If, by 
chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the 
exultant gladness of Lowell in meadows full of 
bobolinks, and in the summer day that is 

" — simply perfect from its own resource 
As to the bee the new campanula's 
Ilhiminate seclusion swung in air." 

Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to 
Bryant by contrast the thouglit of death; and there 
is nowhere in his poetry a passage of deeper feel- 
ing than the closing stanzas of June, in which he 
speaks of himself, by anticipation, as of one 

"Whose pai-t in all the pomp that fills 
The circuit of the summer hills 
Is — that his grave is green." 



Literature in the Cities. 203 

Bryant is, par excellence^ the poet of New England 
wild flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian 
— to each of which he dedicated an entire poem-^ 
the orchis and the golden rod, "the aster in the 
wood and the yellow sunflower by the brook." 
With these his name will be associated as Words- 
worth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine, 
and Emerson's with the rhodora. 

Except when writing of nature he was apt to be 
commonplace, and there are not many such ener- 
getic lines in his purely reflective verse as these 
famous ones from the Battle Field : 

" Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; 

The eternal years of God are hers ; 
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, 

And dies amonj:; his worshipers." 

He added but slowly to the number of his poems, 
publishing a new collection in 1840, another in 
1844, and llihty Poems in 1864. His work at all 
ages was remarkably even. Thanatopsis was as 
mature as any thing that he wrote afterward, and 
among his later pieces, the Planting of the Apple 
Tree and the Flood of Years were as fresh as any 
thing that he had written in the first flush of youth. 
Bryant's poetic style was always pure and correct, 
without any tincture of affectation or extravagance. 
His prose writings are not important, consisting 
mainly of papers of the Salmagundi variety con- 
tributed to the Talisman^ an annual published in 
1827-30; some rather sketchy stories, Tales of the 



204 American Literature. 

Glauber Spa^ 1832; and impressions of Europe, 
entitled, Letters of a Traveler, issued in two series, 
in 1849 and 1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his 
blank-verse translations of the Iliad Siud Odyssey, a 
remarkable achievement for a man of his age, and 
not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent met- 
rical version of Homer in the English tongue. 
Bryant's half century of service as the editor of 
a daily paper should not be overlooked. The 
Evening Post, under his management, was always 
honest, gentlemanly, and courageous, and did much 
to raise the tone of journalism in New York. 

Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the 
Boston coterie, like Bryant, and, like him, tried his 
hand at journalism, was John Greenleaf Whittier.. 
(1807- ). He was born in a solitary farmhouse near 
Haverhill, in the valley of the Merrimack, and his 
lifejias been passed mostly at his native place and 
at the neighboring town of Amesbury. The local 
color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is 
that of the Merrimack from the vicinity of Haver- 
hill to its mouth at Newburyport, a region of hill- 
side farms, opening out below into wide marshes — 
" the low, green prairies of the sea," and the beaches 
of Hampton and Salisbury. The scenery of the 
Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier:^ 
the cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with 
their factories and dams, the sloping pastures arid 
orchards of the back country, the sands of Plum 
Island and the level reaches of water meadow be- 
tween which glide the broad-sailed " gmidalows "— 



Literature in the Cities. 205 

a local corruption of gondola — laden with bay. 
Whittier was a farmer lad, and had only such educa- 
tion as the district school could supply, supplement- 
ed by two years at the Haverhill Academy. In his 
School Days \\Qg\\ts a picture of the little old country 
school-house as it used to be, the only alma mater 
of so many distinguished Americans, and to which 
many others who have afterward trodden the pave- 
ments of great universities look back so fondly 
as to their first wicket gate into the land of 
knowledge. 

" Still sits the school-house by the road, 

A ragged beggar sunning ; 
Around it still the sumachs grow 

And blackberry vines are running. 

" Within, the master's desk is seen, 

Deep-scarred by raps official; 
The warping floor, the battered seats. 

The jack-knife's carved initial." 

A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct 
in the young poet, and he began to contribute 
verses to Garrison's i^Vv*? Press, published at New- 
buryport, and to the Haverhill Gazette. Then he 
went to Boston, and became editor for a short 
time of the Manufacturer. Next he edited the 
Essex Gazette, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took 
charge of George D. Prentice's paper, the New 
England Weekly Review, at Hartford, Conn. Here 
he fell in with a young Connecticut poet of much 
promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the Connccti- 



2o6 American Literature." 

cut Mirror^ whose " Remains " Whittier edited in 
1832. At Hartford, too, he published his first 
book, a volume of prose and verse, entitled Leg- 
ends of New England, 183T, which is not otherwise 
remarkable than as showing his early interest in 
Indian colonial traditions — especially those which 
had a touch of the supernatural-^a mine which he 
afterward worked to good purpose in the Bridal 
of Pennacook, the Witclis £>aughter, and similar 
poems. Some of the Legends testify to Brainard's 
influence and to the influence of Whittier's tem- 
porary residence at Hartford. One of the prose 
pieces, for example, deals with the famous " Moo- 
dus Noises " at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, 
and one of the poems is the same in subject with 
Brainard's Black Fox of Salmon River. After a 
year and a half at Hartford, Whittier returned to 
Haverhill and to farming. 

The antislavery agitation was now beginning, 
and into this he threw himself with all the ardor 
of his nature. He became the poet of the reform 
as Garrison was its apostle, and Sumner and 
Phillips its speakers. In 1833 he published Justice 
and Expediency^ a prose tract against slavery, and 
in the same year he took part in the formation of 
the American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, 
sitting in the convention as a delegate of the 
Boston Abolitionists. Whittier was a Quaker, and 
that denomination, influenced by the preaching of 
John Woolman and others, had long since quietly 
abolished slavery within its own communion. The 



Literature in the Cities. 207 

Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an 
earnest though peaceful part in the Garrisonian 
movement. But it was a strange irony of fate that 
had made the fiery-hearted Whittier a Friend. His 
poems against slavery and disunion have the mar- 
tial ring of a Tyrtaeus or a Korner, added to the 
stern religious zeal of Cromwell's Ironsides. They 
are like the sound of the trumpet blown before the 
walls of Jericho, or the Psalms of David denounc- 
ing woe upon the enemies of God's chosen people. 
If there is any purely Puritan strain in American 
poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker " Her- 
mit of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there 
were three principal collections : Voices of Freedom^ 
1849 ; the Panorama and Other Poefns, 1856 ; and 
In War Time, 1863 ; Whittier's work as the poet of 
freedom was done when, on hearing the bells ring 
for the passage of the constitutional amendment 
abolishing slavery, he wrote his splendid Laus Deo, 
thrilling with the ancient Hebrew spirit : 

" Loud and long 
Lift the old exulting song, 

Sing with Miriam by the sea — 
He has cast the mighty down, 

Horse and rider sink and drown, 

He hath triumphed gloriously. " 

Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of 
the civil war, the best, or at all events the most 
])opular, is Barbara Frietchie. Ichabod, expressing 
the indignation of the Free Soilers at Daniel Web- 
ster's seventh of March speech in defense of the 



2o8 American Literature. 

Fugitive Slave Law, is one of Whittier's b»st polit- 
ical poems, and not altogether unworthy of com- 
parison with Browning's Lost Leader. The lan- 
guage of Whittier's warlike lyrics is biblical, 
and many of his purely devotional j)ieces are re- 
ligious poetry of a high order and have been in- 
cluded in numerous collections of hymns. Of his 
songs of faith and doubt, the best are perhaps Our 
Master., Chapel of the Hennits^ and Eternal Good- 
ness ; one stanza from the last of which is familiar : 

"I know not where His islands lift 

Their fronded palms in air, 
I only know I cannot drift 

Beyond His love and care." 

But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly 
to sing the homely life of the New England coun- 
try side. His rural ballads and idyls are as genu- 
inely American as any thing that our poets have 
written, and have been recommended, as such, to 
English working-men by Whittier's co-religionist, 
John Bright. The most popular of these is prob- 
ably Maud Midler^ whose closing couplet has 
passed into proverb. Skipper Lresons Ride is also 
very current. Better than either of them, as 
poetry, is Telling the Bees. But Whittier's master- 
piece in work of a descriptive and reminiscent 
kind is Snow Bound, 1866, a New England fire- 
side idyl which in its truthfulness recalls tlie 
Winter Evening of Cowper's Task and Burns's 
Cotter s Saturday Night, but in sweetness and ani- 
mation is superior to either of them. Although in 



Literature in the Cities. 209 

some thing.T a Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier 
has never forgotten that he is also a Friend, and 
several of his ballads and songs have been upon 
the subject of the early Quaker persecutions in 
Massachusetts. The most impressive of these is 
Cassandra Southwick. The latest of them, the 
King's Missive^ originally contributed to the 
Memorial History of Boston in 1880, and reprinted 
the next year in a volume with other poems, has 
been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. 
The Bridal of Peiinacook, 1848, and the Tent on 
the Beach, 1867, which contain some of his best 
work,. were series of ballads told by different nar- 
rators, after the fashion of Longfellow's Tales of 
a Wayside Inn. As an artist in verse Whiitier is 
strong and fervid, rather than delicate or rich. 
He uses only a few metrical forms — by preference 
the eight-syllabled rhyming couplet 

— " Maud ^fuller on a summer's day 

Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc. — 

and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes 
very monotonous, as do some of Whittier's man- 
nerisms ; which proceed, however, never from af- 
fectation, but from a lack of study and variety, 
and so, no doubt, in part from the want of that 
academic culture and thorough technical equip- 
ment which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. 
Though his poems are not in dialect, like Lowell's 
Biglow Papers, he knows how to make an artistic 
use of homely provincial words, such as " chore," 
14 



2IO American Literature. 

which give his idyls of the hearth and the barn- 
yard a genuine Doric cast. Whittier's prose is 
inferior to his verse. The fluency v/hich was a 
besetting sin of his poetry when released from the 
fetters of rhyme and meter ran into wordiness. 
His prose writings were partly contributions to the 
slavery controversy, partly biographical sketches 
of English and American reformers, and partly 
studies of the scenery and folk-lore of the Mer- 
rimack Valley. Those of most literary interest 
were the Supernaturalism of New England^ 1S47, 
and some of the papers in Literary Recreations and 
Miscellanies^ 1854. 

While Massachusetts was creating an American 
literatire, other sections of the Union were by no 
means idle. The West, indeed, was as yet too raw 
to add any thing of importance to the artistic prod- 
uct of the country. The South was hampered 
by circumstances which will presently be described. 
But in and about the seaboard cities of New York, 
Philadelphia, Baltimore and Richmond, many pens 
were busy filling the columns of literary weeklies 
and monthlies; and there was a considerable out- 
put, such as it was, of books of poetry, fiction, 
travel, and miscellaneous light literature. Time 
has already relegated most of these to the dusty top- 
shelves. To rehearse the names of the numerous 
contributors to the old Knickerbocker Magazine, to 
Godeys, and Grahains, and the New Mirror, and the 
Southern Literary Messenger, or to run over the list 
of authorlings and poetasters in Poe's papers on 



Literature in the Cities. 211 

the Literati of New York, would be very much 
like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones of 
an old grave-yard. In the columns of these pre- 
historic magazines and in the book notices and 
reviews away back in the thirties and forties, one 
encounters the handiwork and the names of Emer- 
son, Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell, 
embodied in this mass of forgotten literature. It 
would have required a good deal of critical acu- 
men, at the time, to predict that these and a few 
others would soon be thrown out into bold relief, 
as the significant and permanent names in the lit- 
erature of their generation, wliile Paulding, Hirst, 
Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and scores of others 
who figured beside them in the fashionable peri- 
odicals, and filled quite as large a space in the pub- 
lic eye, would sink into oblivion in less than thirty 
years. Some of these latter were clever enough 
people ; they entertained their contemporary pub- 
lic sufficiently, but their work had no vitality 
or "power of continuance." The great majority 
of the writings of any period are necessarily 
ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural 
selection is constantly sifting out the few repre- 
sentative books which shall carry on the memory 
of the period to posterity. Now and then it may 
be predicted of some undoubted work of genius, 
even at the moment that it sees the light, that it 
is destined to endure. But tastes and fashions 
change, and few things are better calculated to in- 
spire the literary critic with humility than to read 



212 American Literature. 

the prophecies in old reviews and see how the 
future, now become the present, has quietly given 
them the lie. 

From among the professional litterateurs of his 
day emerges, with ever sharper distinctness as 
time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe (1809- 
1849.) By the irony of fate Poe was born at 
Boston, and his first volume, Tamerlane and Other 
Foems, 1827, was printed in that city and bore 
upon its title page the words, " By a Bostonian." 
But his parentage, so far as it was any thing, was 
southern. His father was a Marylander who had 
gone upon the stage and married an actress, her- 
self the daughter of an actress and a native of En- 
gland. Left an orphan by the early death of both 
parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a wealthy 
merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated 
partly at an English school, was student for a time 
in the University of Virginia and afterward a cadet 
in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth 
was wild and irregular : he gambled and drank, 
was proud, bitter and perverse ; finally quarreled 
with his guardian and adopted father — by whom 
he was disowned — and then betook himself to the 
life of a literary hack. His brilliant but under- 
paid work for various periodicals soon brought 
him into notice, and he was given the editorship of 
the Southern Literaij Messenger, published at Ricli- 
mond, and subsequently of the Gentlemen s — after- 
ward Graham's — Magazine m Philadelphia. These 
and all other positions Poe forfeited through his 



Literature in the Cities. 213 

dissipated habits and wayward temper, and finally, 
in 1844, he drifted to New York, where he found 
employment on the Evening Mirror and then on 
the Broadway Journal. He died of delirium tre- 
mens at the Marine Hospital in Baltimore. His 
life was one of the most wretched in literary his- 
tory. He was an extreme instance of what used to 
be called the "eccentricity of genius." He had 
the irritable vanity which is popularly supposed 
to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so 
insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow 
and others were constantly plagiarizing from him. 
The best side of Poe's character came out in his 
domestic relations, in which he displayed great 
tenderness, patience and fidelity. His instincts 
were gentlemanly, and his manner and conversa- 
tion were often winning. In the place of moral 
feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his 
critical papers, except where warped by passion or 
prejudice, he showed neither fear nor favor, de- 
nouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands 
and commending obscure merit. The *' impudent 
literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; 
the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manu- 
factured verses for the " Annuals ; " and the twad- 
dle of the " genial " incapables who praised them 
in flabby reviews — all these Poe exposed with 
ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are 
z/;zmoral, can they be called in any sense /wmoral. 
His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as Bry- 
ant's in its austerity. 



214 American Literature. 

By 1 83 1 Poe had published three thin books of 
verse, none of which had attracted notice, although 
the latest contained the drafts of a few of his most 
perfect poems, such as Israfel^ the Valley of Unrest^ 
the City in the Sea, and one of the two pieces in- 
scribed To Helen. It was his habit to touch and 
retouch his work until it grew under his more 
practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fas- 
tidious taste. Hence the same poem frequently 
reappears in different stages- of development in 
successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the 
realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intel- 
lectual nature there was a strange conjunction; an 
imagination as spiritual as Shelley's, though, unlike 
Shelley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear 
and the imagery of ruin ; with this, an analytic 
power, a scientific exactness, and a mechanical in- 
genuity more usual in a chemist or a mathemati- 
cian than in a poet. He studied carefully the 
mechanism of his verse and experimented endless- 
ly with verbal and musical, effects, such as repeti- 
tion, and monotone, and the selection of words in 
which the consonants alliterated and the vowels 
varied. In his Philosophy of Composition he de- 
scribed how his best known poem, the Raven, was 
systematically built up on a preconceived plan in 
which the number of lines was first determined 
and the word "nevermore" selected as a starting 
point. No one who knows the mood in which 
poetry is composed will believe that this ingenious 
piece of dissection really describes the way in 



Literature in the Cities. 215 

which the Raven was ^conceived and written, or 
that any such deliberate and self-conscious pro- 
cess could originate the associations from whi(#h a 
true poem springs. But it flattered Poe's pride of 
intellect to assert that his cooler reason had con- 
trol not only over the execution of his poetry, but 
over the very well-head of thought and emotion. 
Some of his most successful stories, like the Gold 
Bug., the Mystery of Marie Roget^ the Pu?'loined 
Letter., and the Murders in the Rue Morgue., were 
applications of this analytic faculty to the solution 
of puzzles, such as the finding of buried treasure 
or of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a 
mysterious crime. After the publication of the 
Gold Bug he received from all parts of the country 
specimens of cipher writing, which he delighted to 
work out. Others of his tales were clever pieces 
of mystification, like Hans Pfaall^ the story of a 
journey to the moon, or experiments at giving 
verisimilitude to wild improbabilities by the skillful 
introduction of scientific details, as in the Facts in 
the Case of M. Valdemar and Von Kenipelens Dis- 
covery. In his narratives of this kind Poe antici- 
pated the detective novels of Gaboriau and Wilkie 
Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, 
though in a less degree, the artfully worked up 
likeness to fact in Edward Everett Hale's Man 
Without a Country^ and similar fictions. While 
Dickens's Barnaby Riidge was publishing in parts, 
Poe showed his skill as a plot hunter by publishing 
a paper in Graham's Magazine in which the very 



2i6 American Literature. 

tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled 
and i\\e finale predicted in advance. 

In his union of imagination and analytic power 
Poe resembled Coleridge, who, if any one, was his 
teacher in poetry and criticism. Poe's verse often 
reminds one of Christabel and the Ancient Mariner^ 
still oftener of Kubla Khati. Like Coleridge, too, 
he indulged at times in the opium habit. But in 
Poe the artist predominated over every thing else. 
He began not with sentiment or thought, but with 
technique, with melody and color, tricks of lan- 
guage, and effects of verse. It is curious to 
study the growth of his style in his successive 
volumes of poetry. At first these are metrical ex- 
periments and vague images, original, and with a 
fascinating suggestiveness, but with so little mean- 
ing that some of his earlier pieces are hardly re- 
moved from nonsense. Gradually, like distant 
music drawing nearer and nearer, his poetry be- 
comes fuller of imagination and of an inward sig- 
nificance, without ever losing, however, its myste- 
rious aloofness from the real world of the senses. 
It was a part of Poe's literary creed — formed upon 
his own practice and his own limitations, but set 
forth with a great display of a p?-iori reasoning in 
his essay on the Poetic Principle and elsewhere — 
that pleasure and not instruction or moral exlior- 
tation was the end of poetry; that beauty and not 
truth or goodness was its means ; and, furthermore, 
that the pleasure which it gave should be indefinite. 
About his own poetry there was always this in- 



Literature in the Cities. 217 

definiteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange 
country of dream — a ''ghoul-haunted region of 
Weir," "out of space, out of time" — filled with 
unsubstantial landscapes, and peopled by spectral 
shapes. And yet there is a wonderful, hidden 
significance in this uncanny scenery. The reader 
feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a 
kind of language, and that it in some way expresses 
a brooding thought or passion, the terror and de- 
spair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is an ob- 
vious allegory, as in the Haunted Palace^ which is 
the parable of a ruined mind, or in the Rave/i, the 
most popular of all Poe's poems, originally pub- 
lished in the American Whig Review for February, 
1845. Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, 
as in Ulaluvie^ which, to most people, is quite in- 
comprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic 
feeling is among the most characteristic, and, 
therefore, the most fascinating, of its author's 
creations. 

Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad, Anna- 
bel Lee^ and To One in Paradise^ the poet emerges 
into the light of common human feeling and 
speaks a more intelligible language. But in gen- 
eral his poetry is not the poetry of the heart, and 
its passion is not the passion of flesh and blood. 
In Poe the thought of death is always near, 
and of the shadowy borderland between death 
and life. 

" The play is the tragedy ' Man,' 
And its hero the Conqueror Worm," 



2i8 American Literature. 

The prose tale, Ligeia, in which these verses 
are inserted, is one of the most powerful of all 
Poe's writings, and its theme is the power of 
the will to overcome death. In that singu- 
larly impressive poem, the Sleeper^ the morbid 
horror which invests the tomb springs from the 
same source, the materiality of Poe's imagina- 
tion, which refuses to let the soul go free from 
the body. 

This quality explains why Poe's Tales of the 
Grotesque and A?'abesqtie, 1840, are on a lower 
plane than Hawthorne's romances, to which a few 
of them, like William IVilson and the Maji of the 
Crowd, have some resemblance. The former of 
these, in particular, is in Hawthorne's peculiar 
province, the allegory of the conscience. But in 
general the tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual 
one, while Poe calls in the aid of material forces. 
The passion of physical fear or of superstitious 
horror is that which his writings most frequently 
excite. These tales represent various grades of 
the frightful and the ghastly, from the mere bug-a- 
boo story like the Black Cat, which makes children 
afraid to go in the dark, up to the breathless ter- 
ror of the Cask of Amontillado, or the Red Death. 
Poe's masterpiece in this kind is the fateful tale of 
the Fall of the House of Usher, with its solemn 
and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, 
often recalls, in its richly imaginative cast, the 
manner of De Quincey in such passages as his 
Dream Fugue, or Our Ladies of Sorrow. In de- 



Literature in the Cities. 219 

scriptive pieces like tlie Domain of Arnheim, and 
stories of adventure like the Descent into the Mael- 
strom, and his long sea tale, The Narrative of Ar- 
thur Gordon Pym^ 1S38, he displayed a realistic in- 
ventiveness almost equal to Swift's or De Foe's. 
He was not without a mocking irony, but he had 
no constructive humor, and liis attempts at the 
facetious were mostly failures. 

Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. 
^e took no hold upon the life about him, and 
cared nothing for the public concerns of his coun- 
try. His poems and tales might have been writ- 
ten in vacuo for any thing American in them. 
Perhaps for this reason, m part, his fame has been 
so cosmopolitan. In France especially his writings 
have been favorites. Charles Baudelaire, the au- 
thor of the Fleurs du Mai, translated them into 
French, and his own impressive but unhealthy 
poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The 
defect in Poe was in character, a defect which 
will make itself felt in art as in life. If he had 
had the sweet home feeling of Longfellow or the 
moral fervor of Whittier he might have been a 
greater poet than either. 

" If I could dwell 
"Where Israfel 

Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
He might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody, 
"While a bolder note than thi^ might swell 

From my lyre within the sky ! " 



220 American Literature. 

Though Poe was a southerner, if not by birth, at 
least by race and breeding, there was nothing dis- 
tinctly southern about his peculiar genius, and in 
his wandering life he was associated as much with 
Philadelphia and New York as with Baltimore and 
Richmond. The conditions which had made the 
southern colonies unfruitful in literary and educa- 
tional works before the Revolution continued to 
act down to the time of the civil war. Eli Whit- 
ney's invention of the cotton gin in the closing 
years of the last century gave extension to slavery, 
making it profitable to cultivate the new staple by 
enormous gangs of field hands working under the 
whip of the overseer in large plantations. Slavery 
became henceforth a business speculation in the 
States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia 
and Kentucky, a comparatively mild domestic sys- 
tem. The necessity of defending its peculiar in- 
stitution against the attacks of a growing faction 
•in the North compelled the South to throw all its 
intellectual strength into politics, which, for that 
matter, is the natural occupation and excitement 
of a social aristocracy. Meanwhile immigration 
sought the free States, and there was no middle 
class at the South. The "poor whites" were ig- 
norant and degraded. There were people of edu- 
cation in the cities and on some of the plantations, 
but there was no great educated class from which 
a literature could proceed. And the culture of 
the South, such as it was, was becoming old- 
fashioned and local, as the section was isolated 



Literature in the Cities. 221 

more and more from the rest of the Union and 
from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by 
its reactionary prejudices and its sensitiveness on 
the subject of slavery. Nothing can be imagined 
more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical 
editorials in the southern press just before the out- 
break of the war, or than the backward and ill- 
informed articles which passed for reviews in the 
poorly supported periodicals of the South. 
• In the general dearth of work of high and per- 
manent value, one or two southern authors may 
be mentioned whose writings have at least done 
something to illustrate the life and scenery of their 
section. When in 1833 the Baltimore Saturday 
Visiter offered a prize of a hundred dollars for the 
best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded 
the prize to Poe's first story, the MS. Found in a 
Bottle, was John P. Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of 
Baltimore, who afterward became Secretary of 
the Navy in Fillmore's administration. The year 
before he had published Swalloia Barn, a series 
of agreeable sketches of country life in Virginia. 
In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, 
Horse-Shoe Robinson and Rob of the Bowl, the 
former a story of the Revolutionary War in South 
Carolina ; the latter an historical tale of colonial 
Maryland. These had sufficient success to war- 
rant reprinting as late as 1852. But the most 
.popular and voluminous of all Southern writers of 
fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Car- 
olinian, who died in 1870. He wrote over thirty 



222 American Literature. 

novels, mostly romances of Revolutionary history, 
southern life and wild adventure, among the best 
of which were the Partisan^ i835> ^^d the Yemas- 
see. Simms was an inferior Cooper, with a differ- 
ence. His novels are good boys' books, but are 
crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly 
southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, 
the Charleston City Gazette., took part against the 
Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings include 
several histories and biographies, political tracts, 
addresses and critical papers contributed to south- 
ern magazines. He also wrote numerous poems, 
the most ambitious of which y^-xs Atlantis., a Story of 
the Sea, 1832. His poems have little value except 
as here and there illustrating local scenery and 
manners, as in Southern Passa^^es and Pictures, 
1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not 
very strong Virginia Comedians was, perhaps, in 
literary quality the best southern novel produced 
before the civil war. 

When Poe came to New York, the most con- 
spicuous literary figure of the metropolis, with the 
possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was 
N. P. Willis, one of the edkors of the Evening 
Mirror, upon which journal Poe was for a time 
engaged. Willis had made a literary reputation, 
when a student at Yale, by his Scripture Poems, 
written in smootli blank verse. Afterward he had 
edited the American Monthly in his native city of 
Boston, and more recently he had published Pen- 
cillings by the Way, 1835, a pleasant record of Eu- 



Literature in the Cities. 223 

ropean saunterings ; Inklings of Adventure, 1836, 
a collection of dashing stories and sketches of 
American and foreign life ; and Letters from Un- 
der a Bridge, 1839, a series of charming rural let- 
ters from his country place at Owego, on the Sus- 
quehanna. Willis's work, always graceful and 
sparkling, sometmies even brilliant, though light 
in substance and jaunty in style, had quickly 
raised him to the summit of popularity. During 
the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most suc- 
cessful American magazinist, and even down to 
the day of his death, in 1867, he retained his hold 
upon the attention of the fashionable public by 
his easy paragraphing and correspondence in. the 
Mirror and its successor, the Home Journal, which 
catered to the literary wants of the beau monde. 
Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though 
clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and 
sketches, such as F. Smith, The Ghost Ball at Con- 
gress Hall, Edith Linsey, and the Lunatic's Skate, 
together with some of the Letters from Under a 
Bridge, are worthy of preservation, not only as read- 
able stories, but as society studies of life at Amer- 
ican watering places like Nahant and Saratoga 
and Ballston Spa half a century ago. A number of 
his simpler poems, like Unseen Spirits, Spring, To 
M — from Abroad, and Lines on Leaving Europe, 
still retain a deserved place in collections and 
anthologies. 

The senior editor of the Mirror, George P, 
Morris, was once a very popular song writer, and 



224 American Literature. 

his Woodman, Spare that Tree, still survives. 
Other residents of New York City who have writ- 
ten single famous pieces were Clement C, Moore, 
a professor in the General Theological Semina- 
ry, whose Visit fro?n St. Nicholas — *^ 'Twas the 
Night Before Christmas," etc. — is a favorite ballad 
in every nursery in the land ; Charles Fenno 
Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but 
now remembered only as the author of the song, 
Sparkling and Bright, and the patriotic ballad of 
Monterey ; Robert H. Messinger, a native of Bos- 
ton, but long resident in New York, where he was 
a familiar figure in fashionable society, who wrote 
Give Me the Old, a fine ode with a choice Horatian 
flavor ; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and 
occasional writer, whose capital satire of Nothing 
to Wear was published anonymously and had a 
great run. Of younger poets, like Stoddard and Al- 
drich, who formerly wrote for the Mirror and who 
are still living and working in the maturity of their 
powers, it is not within the limits and design of 
this sketch to speak. But one of their contem- 
poraries. Bayard Taylor, who died, American Min- 
ister at Berlin, in 1878, though a Pennsylvanian by 
birth and rearing, may be reckoned among the 
*' literati of New York." A farmer lad from Ches- 
ter County, who had learned the printer's trade 
and printed a little volume of his juvenile verses 
in 1844, he came to New York shortly after 
with credentials from Dr. Grisvvold, the editor of 
Grahanis^ and obtaining encouragement and aid 



Literature in the Cities. 225 

from Willis, Horace Greeley and others, be set 
out to make the tour of Europe, walking from 
town to town in Germany and getting employment 
now and then at his trade to help pay the ex- 
penses of the trip. The story of these IVander- 
jahre he told in his Views Afoot^ 1846. This was 
the first of eleven books of travel written during 
the course of his life. He was an inveterate 
nomad, and his journeyings carried him to the re- 
motest regions — to California, India, China, Japan 
and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and the 
Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland and the " by- 
ways of Europe." His head-quarters at home were 
in New York, where he did literary work for theT'r/- 
bune. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throw- 
ing off many volumes of verse and prose, fiction, es- 
says, sketches, translations and criticism, mainly 
contributed in the first instance to the magazines. 
His versatility was very marked, and his poetry 
ranged from Rhymes of Travel, 1848, and Poems 
of the Orient, 1854? to idyls and home ballads of 
Pennsylvania life, like the Quaker Widow and the 
Old Fennsylvajiia Farmer, and, on the other side, 
to ambitious and somewhat mystical poems, like 
the Masque of the Gods, 1872 — written in four 
days — and dramatic experiments like the Prophet, 
1874, and Prinee Deukalion, 1878. He was a man 
of buoyant and eager nature, with a great appe- 
tite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a 
talent for learning languages, and a too great readi- 
ness to take the hue of his favorite books. From 
15 



226 American Literature. 

his facility, his openness to external impressions 
of scenery and costume and his habit of turning 
these at once into the service of his pen, it results 
that there is something " newspapery " and super- 
ficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's 
work, though reporting of a high order. His 
poetry, too, though full of glow and picturesque- 
ness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not 
unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited 
Bedouin Song, for example, has an echo of Shelley's 
Lines to an Indian Air : 

" From the desert I come to thee 

On a stallion shod with fire ; 
And the winds are left behind 

In the speed of my desire. 
Under thy window I stand 

And the midnight hears my cry; 
I love thee, I love but thee 

With a love that shall not die." 

The dangerous quickness with which he caught 
the manner of other poets made him an admirable 
parodist and translator. His Echo Club, 1876, con- 
tains some of the best travesties in the tongue, 
and his great translation of Goethe's Faust, 
1870-71 — with its wonderfully close reproduction 
of the original meters — is one of the glories of 
American literature. All in all, Taylor may un- 
hesitatingly be put first among our poets of the 
second generation — the generation succeeding that 
of Longfellow and Lowell — although the lack in 
him of original genius self-determined to a pe- 



Literature in the Cities. 227 

culiar sphere, or the Avant of an inward fixity and 
concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward 
impressions, has made him less significant in the 
history of our literary thought than some other 
writers less generously endowed. 

Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. 
They were profuse, eloquent and faulty. John 
Godfreys Fortune, 1864, gave a picture of bo- 
hemian life in New York. Han7iah Thurston, 1863, 
and the Story of Kennett, 1866, introduced many 
incidents and persons from the old Quaker life of 
rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in 
his boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's 
Blithedale Ro7nance, a satire on fanatics and re- 
formers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived cliar- 
acter, though drawn with some exaggeration. The 
Story of Kemtett, which is largely autobiographic^ 
has a greater freshness and reality than the others 
and is full of personal recollections. In these 
novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial 
skill is greater on the whole than his power of cre- 
ating characters or inventing plots. 

Literature in the West now began to have an 
existence. Another young poet from Chester 
County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, 
went to Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study 
sculpture and painting, about 1837, and one of his 
best-known poems, Po7is Maximus, was written on 
the occasion of the opening of the suspension 
bridge across the Ohio. Read came East, to be 
sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our sea- 



228 American Literature. 

board cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a 
minor poet, but some of his Pennsylvania pastor- 
als, like the Deserted Road^ have a natural sweet- 
ness; and his luxurious Drifting, which combines 
the methods of painting and poetry, is justly popu- 
lar. Sheridan s Ride — perhaps his most current 
piece — is a rather forced production and has been 
over-praised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice 
and Phoebe Gary, were attracted to New York in 
1850, as soon as their literary success seemed as- 
sured. They made that city their home for the 
remainder of their lives. Poe praised Alice Gary's 
Pictures of Memory , and Phoebe's Nearer Home 
has become a favorite hymn. There is nothing 
peculiarly Western about the verse of the Gary 
sisters. It is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and 
domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather tame 
and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cher- 
ished by many good women and dear to simple 
hearts. 

A stronger smack of the soil is in the negro 
melodies like Uncle Ned, O Susanna, Old Folks at 
Home, Way Down South, Nelly was a Lady, My 
Old Kentucky Home, etc., which were the work 
not of any southern poet, but of Stephen G. 
Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., and a resident 
of Gincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the 
words and music of these, and many others of a 
similar kind, during the years 1847 to 1861. Taken 
together they form the most original and vital ad- 
dition which this country has made to the psalmody 



Literature in the Cities. 229 

of the world, and entitle Foster to the first rank 
among American song writers. 

As Foster's plaintive > melodies carried the pa- 
thos and humor of the plantation all over the land, 
so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin^ 
1852, brought home to millions of readers the suf- 
ferings of the negroes in the ''black belt" of the 
cotton-growing States. This is the most popular 
novel ever written in America. Hundreds of 
thousands of copies were sold in this country and 
in England, and some forty translations were made 
into foreign tongues. In its dramatized form it 
still keeps the stage, and the statistics of circulat- 
ing libraries show that even now it is in greater 
demand than any other single book. It did more 
than any other literary agency to rouse the public 
conscience to a sense of the shame and horror of 
slavery; more even than Garrison's Liberator; more 
than the indignant poems of Whittier and Lowell 
or the orations of Sumner and Phillips. It pre- 
sented the thing concretely and dramatically, and 
in particular it made the odious Fugitive Slave 
Law forever impossible to enforce. It was useless 
for the defenders of slavery to protest that the 
picture was exaggerated and that overseers like 
Legree were the exception. The system under 
which such brutalities could happen, and did some- 
times happen, was doomed. It is easy now to 
point out defects of taste and art in this master- 
piece, to show that the tone is occasionally melo- 
dramatic, that some of the characters are conven- 



230 American Literature. 

tional, and that the literary execution is in parts 
feeble and in others coarse. In spite of all it re- 
mains true that Uncle Toms Cabin is a great book, 
the work of genius seizing instinctively upon its 
opportunity and uttering the thought of the time 
with a power that thrilled the heart of the nation 
and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never repeated her 
first success. Some of her novels of New England 
life, such as the Minister s Wooing^ 185 9i and the 
Pearl of Orrs Island^ 1862, have a mild kind of 
interest, and contain truthful portraiture of pro- 
vincial ways and traits ; while later fictions of a 
domestic type, like Pi^ik and White Tyranny^ and 
My Wife and I^ are really beneath criticism. 

There were other Connecticut writers contem- 
porary with Mrs. Stowe: Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, for 
example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as 
" the Hemans of America," but now quite obso- 
lete; and J. G. Percival, of New Haven, a shy and 
eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of 
value, and whose memory is preserved by one or 
two of his simpler poems, still in circulation, such 
as To Seneca Lake and the Coral Grove. Another 
Hartford poet, Brainard — already spoken of as an 
early friend of Whittier — died young, leaving a few 
pieces which show that his lyrical gift was spon- 
taneous and genuine but had received little culti- 
vation. A much younger writer than either of 
these, Donald G. Mitchell, of Ncav Haven, has a 
more lasting place in our literature, by virtue of 
his charmingly written Reveries of a Bachelor, 



Literature in the Cities. 231 

1850, and Dreain Life^ 1852, stories which sketch 
themselves out in a series of reminiscences and 
lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal 
freshly to young men because they have that 
dreamy outlook upon life which is characteristic 
of youth. But, upon the whole, the most impor- 
tant contribution made by Connecticut in that gen- 
eration to the literary stock of America was the 
Beecher family. Lyman Beecher had been an in- 
fluential preacher and theologian, and a sturdy de- 
fender of orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. 
Of his numerous sons and daughters, all more or 
less noted for intellectual vigor and independence, 
the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry 
Ward Beecher, the great pulpit orator of Brook- 
lyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to give 
more than his spare moments to general litera- 
ture. His sermons, lectures, and addresses were 
reported for the daily papers and printed in part 
in book form ; but these lose greatly when di- 
vorced from the large, warm, and benignant per- 
sonality of the man. His volumes made up of 
articles in the Independent and the Ledger^ such as 
Star Papers^ i^SS? ^^d Eyes and Ears, 1862, con- 
tain many delightful niorceatix upon country life 
and similar topics, though they are hardly wrought 
with sufficient closeness and care to take a perma- 
nent place in letters. Like Willis's Ephemera, 
they are excellent literary journalism, but hardly 
literature. 

We may close our retrospect of American litera- 



232 American Literature. 

ture before 1861 with a brief notice of one of the 
most striking literary phenomena of the time^ 
the Leaves of Grass of Walt Whitman, published 
at Brooklyn in 1855. The author, born at West 
Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been printer, 
school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had 
scribbled a good deal of poetry of the ordinary 
kind, which attracted little attention, but finding 
conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a 
vehicle for his need of expression, he discarded 
them for a kind of rhythmic chant, of which the 
following is a fair specimen: 

"Press close, bare bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic, 

nourishing night ! 
Night of south winds ! night of the few large stars ! 
Still, nodding night ! mad, naked, summer night ! " 

The invention was not altogether a new one. The 
English translation of the Psalms of David and of 
some of the Prophets, the Poems of Ossian, and 
some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, es- 
pecially the Strayed Reveller^ have an irregular 
rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the old 
Anglo-Saxon poems, like Beowulf, and the Script- 
ure paraphrases attributed to Caedmon. But this 
species of oratio soliita, carried to the lengths to 
which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty 
which was displeasing to some, while to others, 
weary of familiar measures and jingling rhymes, 
it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom. 
There is no consenting estimate of this poet. 



Literature in the Cities. 233 

Many think that his so-called poems are not poems 
at all, but simply a bad variety of prose; that there 
is nothing to him beyond a combination of affec- 
tation and indecency ; and that the Whitman citlte 
is a passing " fad " of a few literary men, and es- 
pecially of a number of English critics like Ros- 
setti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being deter- 
mined to have something unmistakably American 
— that .is, different from any thing else — in writings 
from this side of the water before they will acknowl- 
edge any originality in them, have been misled into 
discovering in Whitman "the poet of Democracy." 
Others maintain that he is the greatest of American 
poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is 
"cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end 
forever to puling rhymes and lines chopped up inio 
metrical feet. Whether Whitman's poetry is for- 
mally poetry at all or merely the raw material of 
poetry, the chaotic and amorphous impression 
which it makes on readers of conservative tastes 
results from his effort to take up into his verse 
elements which poetry has usually left out — the 
ugly, the earthy, and even the disgusting ; the 
" under side of things," which he holds not to be 
prosaic when apprehended with a strong, mascu- 
line joy in life and nature seen in all their aspects. 
The lack of these elements in the conventional 
poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving 
out the salt from the ocean, making poetry merely 
pretty and blinking whole classes of facts. Hence 
the naturalism and animalism of some of the divis- 



234 American Literature. 

ions in Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled 
Children of Adam ^ which gave great offense by its 
immodesty, or its outspokenness. Whitman holds 
that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of 
the body in healthy exercise are equally clean ; 
that all, in fact, are divine., and that matter is as 
divine as spirit. The effort to get every thing into 
his poetry, to speak out his thought just as it 
comes to him, accounts, too, for his way of cata- 
loguing objects without selection. His single ex- 
pressions are often unsurpassed for descriptive 
beauty and truth. He speaks of ^' the vitreous 
pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," of 
the '' lisp " of the plane, of the prairies, " where 
herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the 
square miles." But if there is any eternal distinc- 
tion between poetry and prose the most liberal 
canons of the poetic art will never agree to accept 
lines like these : 

*' And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck 

and ankles ; 
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and 

passed north." 

Whitman is the spokesman of Democracy and of 
the future; full of brotherliness and hope, loving 
the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd and 
the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. 
He liked the people — multitudes of people; the 
swarm of life beheld from a Broadway omnibus or 
a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro 



Literature in the Cities. 235 

truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the 
gentleman and the scholar. " I loafe and invite 
my soul," he writes: " I sound my barbaric yawp 
over the roofs of the world." His poem IFaU 
Whitman^ frankly egotistic, simply describes him- 
self as a typical, average man — the same as any 
other man, and therefore not individual but uni- 
versal. He has great tenderness and heartiness — 
''the good gray poet;" and during the civil war he 
devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded sol- 
diers in the Washington hospitals — an experience 
which he has related in the Dresser and else- 
where. It is characteristic of his rough and ready 
camaraderie to use slang and newspaper English in 
his poetry, to call himself Walt instead of W^alter, 
and to have his picture taken in a slouch hat and 
with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His de- 
criers allege that he poses for effect ; that he is 
simply a backward eddy in tlie tide, and significant 
only as a temporary reaction against ultra civili- 
zation — like Thoreau, though in a different way. 
But with all his mistakes in art there is a healthy, 
virile, tumultuous pulse of life in his lyric utter- 
ance and a great sweep of imagination in his 
panoramic view of times and countries. One likes 
to read him because he feels so good, enjoys so 
fully the play of his senses, and has such a lusty 
confidence in his own immortality and in the pros- 
pects of the human race. Stripped of verbiage and 
repetition, his ideas are not many. His indebted- 
ness to Emerson— who wrote an introduction to 



236 American Literature. 

the Leaves of Grass — is manifest. He sings of 
man and not men, and the individual differences 
of character, sentiment, and passion, the dramatic 
elements of life, find small place in his system. 
It is too early to say what will be his final position 
in literary history. But it is noteworthy that the 
democratic masses have not accepted him yet as 
their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of 
conscience and feeling, are the darlings of the 
American people. The admiration, and even the 
knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, con- 
fined to the literary class. It is' also not without 
significance as to the ultimate reception of his in- 
novations in verse that he has numerous parodists, 
but no imitators. The tendency among our younger 
poets is not toward the abandonment of rhyme and 
meter, but toward the introduction of new stanza 
forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in 
the technique of their art. It is observable, too, that 
in his most inspired passages Whitman reverts to 
the old forms of verse; to blank verse, for example, 
in the Ma?i~of- War-Bird : 

" Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, 
Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc., 

and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hex- 
ameters and pentameters: 

" Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the 

river! . . . 
Far-swooping, elbowed earth I rich,, apple-blossomed 

earth." 



Literature in the Cities. 237 

Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, My Captain^ 
written after the assassination of Abraham Lin- 
coln, differs little in form from ordinary verse, as 
a stanza of it will show: 

" My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; 
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and 

done; 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. 
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! 

But I, with mournful tread, 
"Walk the deck, my captain lies 
Fallen, cold and dead." 



This is from Drum Taps, a volume of poems of 
the civil war. Whitman has also written prose 
having much the same quality as his poetry: 
Democratic Vistas^ Alemoranda of the Civil JVar, 
and more recently, Speci^nen Days. His residence 
of late years has been at Camden, New Jersey, 
where a centennial edition of his writings was 
published in 1876. 

1. William Cullen Bryant. Thanatopsis. To 
a Waterfowl. Green River. Hymn to the 
North Star. A Forest Hymn. "O Fairest of 
the Rural Maids." June. The Death of the 
Flowers. The Evening Wind. The Battle Field. 
The Planting of the Apple-tree. The Flood of 
Years. 

2. John Greenleaf Whittier. Cassandra South- 



238 American Literature. 

wick. The New Wife and the Old. The Virginia 
Slave Mother. Randolph of Roanoke. Barclay of 
Ary. The Witch of Wenham. Skipper Ireson's 
Ride. Marguerite. Maud Muller. Telling the 
Bees. My Playmate. Barbara Frietchie. Icha- 
bod. Laus Deo. Snow Bound. 

3. Edgar Allan Poe. The Raven. The Bells. 
Israfel. Ulalume. To Helen. The City in the 
Sea. Annabel Lee. To One in Paradise. The 
Sleeper. The Valley of Unrest. The Fall of the 
House of Usher. Ligeia. William Wilson. The 
Cask of Amontillado, The Assignation. The 
Masque of the Red Death. Narrative of A. Gor- 
don Pym. 

4. N. P. Willis. Select Prose Writings. New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1886. 

5. Mrs. H. B. Stovve. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
Oldtown Folks. 

6. W. G. Simms. The Partisan. The Ye- 
massee. 

7. Bayard Taylor. A Bacchic Ode. Hylas. 
Kubleh. The Soldier and the Pard. Sicilian 
Wine. Taurus. Serapion. The Metempsycho- 
sis of the Pine. The Temptation of Hassan Ben 
Khaled. Bedouin Song. Euphorion. The Quaker 
Widow. John Reid. Lars. Views Afoot. By- 
ways of Europe. The Story of Kennett. The 
Echo Club. 

8. Walt Whitman. My Captain. "When Li- 
lacs Last in the Door-yard Bloomed." " Out of 
the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." Pioneers, O Pi- 



Literature in the Cities. 239 

oneers. The Mystic Trumpeter. A Woman at 
Auction. Sea-shore Memoirs. Passage to India. 
Mannahatta. The Wound Dresser. Longings for 
Home. 

9. Poets of America. By E. C. Stedman. Bos- 
ton: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885. 



240 American Literature. 



CHAPTER VII. 

LITERATURE SINCE 1861. 

A GENERATION has nearly passed since the out- 
break of the civil war, and although public affairs 
are still mainly in the hands of men who had 
reached manhood before the conflict opened, or 
who were old enough at that time to remember 
clearly its stirring events, the younger men who 
are daily coming forward to take their places 
know it only by tradition. It makes a definite 
break in the history of our literature, and a num- 
ber of new literary schools and tendencies have 
appeared since its close. As to the literature of 
the war itself, it was largely the work of writers 
who had already reached or passed middle age. 
All of the more important authors described in the 
last three chapters survived the Rebellion, except 
Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, 
and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the 
second and fourth years of the war, respectively. 
The final and authoritative history of the struggle 
has not yet been written, and cannot be written 
for many years to come. Many partial and tenta- 
tive accounts have, however, appeared, among 
which may be mentioned, on the northern side, 



LiTERATIJRE SiNCE 1861. 24I 

Horace Greeley's American Conflict, 1864-66; 
Vice-president Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave 
Power in America^ and J. W. Draper's American 
Civil TVar, 1868-70; on the southern side Alexan- 
der H. Stephens's Confederate States of America^ 
Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate 
States of America^ and E. A. Pollard's Lost Cause. 
These, with the exception of Dr. Draper's philo- 
sophical narrative, have the advantage of being the 
work of actors in the political or military events 
which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, 
therefore, partisan — in some instances passionately 
partisan. A storehouse of materials for the com- 
ing historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's 
great collection, the Rebellion Record ; in numer- 
ous regimental histories and histories of special 
armies, departments, and battles, like W. Swinton's 
Army of the Potomac ; in the autobiographies and 
recollections of Grant and Sherman and other 
military leaders ; in the ''war papers," now pub- 
lishing in the Centuiy magazine, and in innumera- 
ble sketches and reminiscences by officers and 
privates on both sides. 

The war had its poetry, its humors and its 
general literature, some of which have been men- 
tioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, 
Whitman, and others ; and some of which remain 
to be mentioned, as the work of new writers, or 
of writers who had previously made little mark. 
There were war songs on both sides, few of which 
had much literary value excepting, perhaps, James 
16 



242 American Literature. 

R. Randall's southern hvi\\3.(\, Afaiyland, My Mary- 
landj sung to the old college air of Lauriger Ho7'a- 
tiiis, and the grand martial chorus of John Brown s 
Body^ an old Methodist hymn, to which the north- 
ern armies beat time as they went "marching on." 
Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its 
fire-eating absurdities about "vandals" and "min- 
ions" and "northern scum," the cheap insults of 
the southern newspaper press. To furnish the 
John Brown chorus with words wortliy of the 
music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her Batik 
Hymn of the Republic, a noble poem, but rather 
too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully 
accepted by the soldiers. Among the many verses 
which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of 
that stern time, which told of partings and home-, 
comings, of women waiting by desolate hearths, in 
country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons 
who had gone to the war, or which celebrated in- 
dividual deeds of heroism or sang the thousand 
private tragedies and' heart-breaks of the great 
conflict, by far the greater number were of too 
humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour. 
Among the best or the most popular of them were 
Kate Putnam 0'E>gooA\ Driving Honie-the Cows, Mrs. 
Ethel Lynn Beers's All Quiet Along the Potomac, 
Forceythe Willson's Old Sergeant, and John James 
Piatt's Riding to Vote. Of the poets whom the war 
brought out, or developed, the most noteworthy 
were Henry Timrod, of South Caro.lina, and Henry 
Howard Brownell, of Connecticut. During the 



Literature Since i86i. 243 

war Tim rod was with the Confederate Army of 
the West, as correspondent for the Charleston 
Mercury, and in 1864 he became assistant editor 
of the So7ith Carolinian, at Columbia. Sherman's 
** march to the sea" broke up his business, and he 
returned to Cliarleston. A complete edition of his 
poems was published in 1873, six years after his 
death. The prettiest of all Timrod's poems is 
Katie, but more to our present purpose are Charles- 
ton — written in the time of blockade — and the Un- 
knoivn Dead, which tells 

" Of nameless graves on battle plains, 
Wasli'd by a single winter's rains, 
Where, some beneath Virginian hills, 
And some by green Atlantic rills, 
Some by the waters of the West, 
A myriad unknown heroes rest." 

When the war was over a poet of New York 
State, F, M. Finch, sang of these and of other graves 
in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric. The Blue 
and the Gray, which spoke the word of recon- 
ciliation and consecration for North and South 
alike. 

Brownell, whose Lyrics of a Day and War Lyrics 
were published respectively in 1864 and 1866, was 
private secretary to Farragut, on whose flag-ship, 
the LLartford, he was present at several great 
naval engagements, such as the '' Passage of the 
Forts " below New Orleans, and the action off 
Mobile, described in his poem, the Bay Fight. 



244 American Literature. 

With some roughness and unevenness of execu- 
tion, Brownell's poetry had a fire which places 
him next to Whittier as the Korner of the civil war. 
In him, especially, as in Whittier, is that Puritan 
sense of the righteousness of his cause which 
made the battle for the Union a holy war to the 
crusaders against slavery: 

"Full red the furnace fires must glow 
That melt the ore of mortal kind : 

The mills of God are grinding slow, 
But ah, how close they grind! 

'* To-day the Dahlgren and the drum 

Are dread apostles of his name ; 
His kingdom here can only come 

By chrism of blood and flame." 

One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theo- 
dore Winthrop, hardly known as a writer until the 
publication in the Atlantic Monthly of his vivid 
sketches of Washington as a Canip^ describing the 
march of his regiment, the famous New York 
Seventh, and its first quarters in the Capitol at 
Washington. A tragic interest was given to these 
papers by Winthrop's gallant death in the action 
of Big Bethel, June lo, 1861. While this was still 
fresh in public recollection his manuscript novels 
were published, together with a collection of his 
stories and sketches reprinted from the magazines. 
His novels, though in parts crude and immature, 
have a dash and buoyancy — an out-door air about 
them — which give the reader a winning impression 



Literature Since i86i. 245 

of Winthrop's personality. The best of them is, 
perhaps, Cecil Dreeme, a romance that reminds 
one a little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which 
is the New York University building on Washing- 
ton Square, a locality that has been further cele- 
brated in Henry James's novel of WasJiingtoti 
Square. 

Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, 
Fitz James O'Brien, an Irishman by birth, who 
died at Baltimore, in 1862, from the effects of a 
wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had con- 
tributed to the magazines a number of poems 
and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among 
which X\\^ Diamojid Lens and What Was It 1 had 
something of Edgar A. Poe's quality. Another 
Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the 
pen-name of "Miles O'Reilly," wrote a good many 
clever ballads of the war, partly serious and partly 
in comic brogue. Prose writers of note furnished 
the magazines with narratives of their experience 
at the seat of war, among papers of which kind 
may be mentioned Dr. Holmes's My Search for 
the Captain^ in the Atlantic Monthly, and Colonel 
T. W. Higgin son's Ar^ny Life in a Black Regiment^ 
collected into a volume in 1870. 

Of the public oratory of the war the foremost 
example is the ever-memorable address of Abra- 
ham Lincoln at the dedication of the National 
Cemetery at Gettysburg. The war had brought 
the nation to its intellectual majority. In the 
stress of that terrible fight there was no room for 



246 American Literature. 

buncombe and verbiage, such as the newspapers 
and stump-speakers used to dole out in ante hel- 
ium days. Lincoln's speech is short — a few grave 
words which he turned aside for a moment to 
speak in the midst of his task of saving the coun- 
try. The speech is simple, naked of figures, every 
sentence impressed with a sense of responsibility 
for the work yet to be done and with a stern de- 
termination to do it. " Li a larger sense," it says, 
"we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we 
cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living 
and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it 
far above our poor power to add or detract. The 
world will little note nor long remember what we 
say here, but it can never forget what they did 
here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedi- 
cated here to the unfinished work which they who 
fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It 
is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great 
task remaining before us ; that from these honored 
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for 
which. they gave the last full measure of devotion; 
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall 
not have died in vain: that this nation, under God, 
shall have a new birth of freedom; and that gov- 
ernment of the people, by the people, for the peo- 
ple, shall not perish from the earth." Here was 
eloquence of a different sort from the sonorous 
perorations of Webster or the polished climaxes of 
Everett. As we read the plain, strong language 
of this brief classic, with its solemnity, its restraint, 



Literature Since 1861. 247 

its "brave old wisdom of sincerity," we seem to see 
the president's homely features irradiated with the 
light of coming martyrdom — 

" The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseemg man. 

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, the first American." 

Within the past quarter of a century the popu- 
lar school of American humor has reached its cul- 
mination. Every man of genius who is a humorist 
at all is so in a way peculiar to himself. There is 
no lack of individuality in the humor of Irving and 
Hawthorne and the wit of Holmes and Lowell, but 
although they are new in subject and application 
they are not new in kind. Irving, as we have 
seen, was the literary descendant of Addison. 
The character sketches in Bracebridge Hall are of 
the same family with Sir Roger de Coverley and 
the other figures of the Spectator Club. Knicker- 
bocker s History of New York, though purely 
American in its matter, is not distinctly American 
in its method, which is akin to the mock heroic of 
Fielding and the irony of Swift in the Voyage to 
LillipHt. Irving's humor, like that of all the great 
English humorists, had its root in the perception 
of character — of the characteristic traits of men 
and classes of men, as ground of amusement. It 
depended for its effect, therefore, upon its truth- 
fulness, its dramatic insight and sympathy, as did 
the humor of Shakspere, of Sterne, Lamb, and 
Thackeray. This perception of the characteristic, 



248 American Literature. 

when pushed to excess, issues in grotesque and 
caricature, as in some of Dickens's inferior crea- 
tions, which are little more than personified single 
tricks of manner, speech, feature, or dress. Haw- 
thorne's rare humor differed from Irving's in tem- 
per but not in substance, and belonged, like Irving's, 
to the English variety. Dr. Holmes's more pro- 
nouncedly comic verse does not differ specifically 
from the facetice of Thomas Hood, but his prom- 
inent trait is wit, which is the laughter of the head 
as humor is of the heart. The same is true, with 
qualifications, of Lowell, whose Biglow Papers^ 
though humor of an original sort in their revela- 
tion of Yankee character, are essentially satirical. 
It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the hits in 
the Biglow Papers, their logical, that is, 7i>itiy charac- 
ter, as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests 
the attention. They are funny, but they are not so 
funny as they are smart. In all these writers humor 
was blent with more serious qualities, which gave 
fineness and literary value to their humorous writ- 
ings. Their view of life was not exclusively comic. 
But there has been a class of jesters, of professional 
humorists in America, whose product is so indige- 
nous, so different, if not in essence, yet at least in 
• form and expression, from any European humor, that 
it may be regarded as a unique addition to the comic 
literature of the world. It has been accepted as such 
in England, where Artemus Ward and Mark Twain 
are familiar to multitudes who have never read the 
One-Hoss-Shay or the Coiiriiii. And though it 



Literature Since i86i. 249 

would be ridiculous to maintain that either of 
these writers takes rank with Lowell and Holmes, 
or to deny that there is an amount of flatness and 
coarseness in many of their labored fooleries which 
puts large portions of their waitings below the line 
where real literature begins, still it will not do to 
ignore them as mere buffoons, or even to predict 
that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is 
true that no literary fashion is more subject to 
change than the fashion of a jest, and that jokes 
that make one generation laugh seem insipid to 
the next. But there is something perennial in the 
fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon called " the great 
jester of France;" and though the puns of Shak- 
spere's clowns are detestable the clowns themselves 
have not lost their power to amuse. 

The Americans are not a gay people, but they 
are fond of a joke. Lincoln's " little stories " were 
characteristically Western, and it is doubtful wheth- 
er he was more endeared to the masses by his solid 
virtues than by the humorous perception which 
made him one of them. The humor of which we 
are speaking now is a strictly popular and national 
possession. Though America has never, or not 
until lately, had a comic paper ranking with Punch 
or Charivari or the Fliegende Blatter^ every news- 
paper has had its funny column. Our humorists 
have been graduated from the journalist's desk 
and sometimes from the printing-press, and now 
and then a local or country newspaper has risen 
into sudden prosperity from the possession of a 



250 American Literature. 

new humorist, as in the case of G. D. Prentice's 
Courier- Journal^ or more recently of the Cleveland 
Plain Dealer^ the Dajibury News, the Burlingto?t 
Haw key e, the Arkansaw Traveller, the Texas Si fl- 
ings and numerous others. Nowadays there are 
even syndicates of humorists, who co-operate to 
supply fun for certain groups of periodicals. Of 
course the great majority of these manufacturers 
of jests for newspapers and comic almanacs are 
doomed to swift oblivion. But it is not so certain 
that the best of the class, like Clemens and Browne, 
will not long continue to be read as illustrative of 
one side of the American mind, or that their best 
things will not survive as long as the mots of Syd- 
ney Smith, which are still as current as ever. One 
of the earliest of them was Seba Smith, who, under 
the name of Major Jack Downing, did his best to 
make Jackson's administration ridiculous: B. P. 
Shillaber's " Mrs. Partington " — a sort of Amer- 
ican Mrs. Malaprop — enjoyed great vogue before 
the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the 
Phoenixiaiia, 1855, and Squibob Papers, 1856, of 
Lieutenant George H. Derby, '* John Phoenix," 
one of the pioneers of literature on the Pacific 
coast at the time of the California gold fever of 
'49. Derby's proposal for A New System of En- 
glish Grammar, his satirical account of the topo- 
graphical survey of the two miles of road between 
San Francisco and the Mission Dolores, and his 
picture gallery made out of the conventional 
houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, runaway negroes 



Literature Since i86i. 251 

and other designs which used to figure in the ad- 
vertising columns of the newspapers, were all very- 
ingenious and clever. But all these pale before 
Artemus Ward — *'Artemus the delicious," as 
Charles Reade called him — who first secured for 
this peculiarly American type of humor a hearing 
and reception abroad. Ever since the invention of 
Hosea Biglow, an imaginary personage of some 
^sort, under cover of whom the author might con- 
ceal his own identity, has seemed a necessity to 
our humorists. Artemus Ward was a traveling 
showman who went about the country exhibiting 
a collection of wax "figgers" and whose expe- 
riences and reflections were reported in grammar 
and spelling of a most ingeniously eccentric kind. 
His inventor was Charles F. Browne, originally of 
Maine, a printer by trade and afterward a news- 
paper writer, and editor at Boston, Toledo and 
Cleveland, where his comicalities in the Plaindealer 
first began to attract notice. In i860 he came to 
New York and joined the staff of Vanity Fair, a 
comic weekly of much brightness, which ran a 
short career and perished for want of capital; 
When Browne began to appear as a public lect- 
urer people who had formed an idea of him from 
his impersonation of the shrewd and vulgar old 
showman were surprised to find him a gentle- 
manly-looking young man, who came upon the 
platform in correct evening dress, and '' spoke his 
piece" in a quiet and somewhat mournful manner, 
stopping in apparent surprise when any one in the 



252 American Literature. 

audience laughed at any uncommonly outrageous 
absurdity. In London, where he delivered his 
Lecture o?i the Mormons^ in 1866, tlie gravity of his 
bearing at first imposed upon his hearers, who had 
come to the hall in search of instructive informa- 
tion and were disappointed at the inadequate 
nature of the panorama which Browne had had 
made to illustrate his lecture. Occasionally some 
hitch would occur in the machinery of this and 
the lecturer would leave the rostrum for a few 
moments to '' work the moon " that shone upon 
the Great Salt Lake, apologizing on his return on 
the ground that he was "a man short" and offering 
'' to pay a good salary to any respectable boy of 
good parentage and education who is a good 
moonist." When it gradually dawned upon the 
British intellect that these and similar devices of 
the lecturer — such as the soft music which he had 
the pianist play at pathetic passages — nay, that the 
panorama and even the lecture itself were of a 
humorous intention, the joke began to take, and 
Artemus's success in England became assured. 
He was employed as one of the editors of Punch. 
but died at Southampton in the year following. 

Some of Artemus Ward's effects were produced 
by cacography or bad spelling, but there was 
genius in the wildly erratic way in which he 
handled even this rather low order of humor. It 
is a curious commentary on the wretchedness of 
our English orthography that the phonetic spelling 
of a word, as for example, wuz for was^ should be 



Literature Since i86i. 253 

in itself an occasion of mirth. Other verbal effects 
of a different kind were among his devices, as in the 
passage where the seventeen widows of a deceased 
Mormon offered themselves to Artemus. 

" And I said, ' Why is this thus ? What is the 
reason of this thusness?' They hove a sigh— 
seventeen sighs of different size. They said— 
" ' O, soon thou will be gonested away.' 
"I told them that when I got ready to leave a 
•place I wentested.' 

'' They said, ' Doth not like us ? ' 
" I said, ' I doth— I doth.' 

" I also said, ' I hope your intentions are honor- 
able, as I am a lone child— my parents being far- 
far away.' 

'' They then said, ' Wilt not marry us ? ' 
" I said, ' O no, it cannot was.' 
"When they cried, *0 cruel man! this is too 
n^^ich !— O ! too much,' I told them that it was on 
account of the muchness that I declined." 

It is hard to define the difference between the 
humor of one writer and another, orX)f one nation 
and another. It can be felt and can be illus- 
trated by quoting examples, but scarcely de- 
scribed in general terms. It has been said of 
that class of American humorists of which Ar- 
temus Ward is a representative that their pecul- 
iarity consists in extravagance, surprise, audacity 
and irreverence. But all these qualities have 
characterized other schools of humor. There is 
the sam^ element of surprise in De Quincey's 



254 American Literature. 

anticlimax, '' Many a man has datqd his ruin from 
some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time 
he thought little of," as in Artemus's truism that 
"a comic paper ought to publish a joke now and 
then." The violation of logic which makes us 
laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source of the 
humor in Artemus's saying of Jeff Davis, that ''it 
would have been better than ten dollars in his 
pocket if he had never been born." Or in his ad- 
vice, " Always live within your income, even if 
you have to borrow money to do so ; " or, again, 
in his announcement that, " Mr. Ward will pay no 
debts of his own contracting." A kind of ludi- 
crous confusion, caused by an unusual collocation 
of words, is also one of his favorite tricks, as when 
he says of Brigham Young, " He's the most mar- 
ried man I ever saw in my life;" or when, having 
been drafted at several hundred different places 
where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, he 
says that if he went on he should soon become a 
regiment, and adds, " I never knew that there was so 
many of me." With this a whimsical under-state- 
ment and an affectation of simplicity, as where he 
expresses his willingness to sacrifice "even his 
wife's relations" on the altar of patriotism; or, 
where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own 
sins against orthography, he pronounces that 
" Chaucer was a great poet, but he couldn't spell," 
or where he says of the feast of raw dog, tendered 
him by tlie Indian chief, Wocky-bocky, "It don't 
agree with me. I prefer simple food." On the 



Literature Since i86i. 255 

whole, it may be said of original humor of this 
kind, as of other forms of originality in literature, 
that the elements of it are old, but their combina- 
tions are novel. Other humorists, like Henry W. 
Shaw (" Josh Billings "), and David R. Locke, 
("Petroleum V. Nasby "), have used bad spelling 
as a part of their machinery ; while Robert H. 
Newell, {'' Orpheus C. Kerr"), Samuel L. Clemens, 
("Mark Twain "), and more recently "Bill Nye," 
though belonging to the same school of low or 
broad comedy, have discarded cacography. Of 
these the most eminent, by all odds, is Mark 
Twain, who has probably made more people laugh 
than any other living writer. A Missourian by 
birth (1835), he served the usual apprenticeship at 
type-setting and editing country newspapers ; spent 
seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi steam-boat, 
and seven years more mining and journalizing in 
Nevada, where he conducted the Virginia City 
Entei'prise ; finally drifted to San Francisco, and 
was associated with Bret Harte on the Calif oniiau., 
and in 1867 published his first book, the Jumpiii^r 
Frog. This was succeeded by the Innocents 
Abroad, 1869; Roughing It, 1872; A Tramp 
Abroad, 1880, and by otliers not so good. 

Mark Twain's drolleries have frequently the 
same air of innocence and surprise as Artemus 
Ward's, and there is a like suddenness in his turns 
of expression, as where he speaks of " the calm 
confidence of a Christian with four aces." If he 
did not originate, he at any rate employed very 



256 American Literature. 

effectively that now familiar device of the news- 
paper "funny man," of putting a painful situation 
euphemistically, as when he says of a man who 
was hanged that he " received injuries which ter- 
minated in his death." He uses to the full extent 
the American humorist's favorite resources of ex- 
aggeration and irreverence. • An instance of the 
former quality may be seen in his famous descrip- 
tion of a dog chasing a coyote, in Roughing It, or 
in his interview with the lightning-rod agent in 
Mark Tiuains Sketches, 1875. He is a shrewd ob- 
server, and his humor has a more satirical side 
than Artemus Ward's, sometimes passing into 
downright denunciation. He delights particularly 
in ridiculing sentimental humbug and moralizing 
cant. He runs a tilt, as has been said, at "copy- 
book texts," at the temperance reformer, the tract 
distributor, the Good Boy of Sunday-school 
literature, and the women who send bouquets 
and sympathetic letters to interesting criminals. 
He gives a ludicrous turn to famous historical 
anecdotes, such as the story of George Washington 
and his little hatchet; burlesques the time-honored 
adventure, in nautical romances, of the starving 
crev/ casting lots in the long boat, and spoils the 
dignity of antiquity by modern trivialities, saying 
of a discontented sailor on Columbus's ship, "He 
wanted fresh shad." The fun of Innocents Abroad 
consists in this irreverent application of modern, 
common sense, utilitarian, democratic standards to 
the memorable places and historic associations of 



Literature Since i86i, 257 

Europe. Tried by this test the Old Masters in 
the picture galleries become laughable. Abelard 
was a precious scoundrel, and the raptures of the 
guide books are parodied without mercy. The 
tourist weeps at the grave of Adam. At Genoa 
he drives the cicerone to despair by pretending 
never to have heard of Christopher Columbus, and 
inquiring innocently, " Is he dead .'' " It is Europe 
vulgarized and stripped of its illusions — Europe 
seen by a Western newspaper reporter without any 
"historic imagination." 

The method of this whole class of humorists is 
the opposite of Addison's or Irving's or Thack- 
eray's. It does not amuse by the perception of the 
characteristic. It is not founded upon truth, but 
upon incongruity, distortion, unexpectedness. 
Every thing in life is reversed, as in opera bouffe, 
and turned topsy turvy, so that paradox takes the 
place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless 
they have supplied a wholesome criticism upon 
sentimental excesses, and the world is in their 
debt for many a hearty laugh. 

In the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1863, 
appeared a tale entitled the Man Without a 
Country, which made a great sensation, and did 
much to strengthen patriotic feeling in one of the 
darkest hours of the nation's history. It was the 
story of one Philip Nolan, an army officer, whose 
head had been turned by Aaron Burr, and who, 
having been censured by a court-martial for some 
minor offense, exclaimed, petulantly, upon men- 
17 



258 American Literature. 

tion being made of the United States Government, 
''Damn the United States! I wish that I might 
never hear the United States mentioned again." 
Thereupon he was sentenced to have his wish, 
and was kept all his life aboard the vessels of the 
navy, being sent off on long voyages and trans- 
ferred from ship to ship, with orders to those in 
charge that his country and its concerns should 
never be spoken of in his presence. Such an air 
of reality was given to the narrative by incidental 
references to actual persons and occurrences that 
many believed it true, and some were found who 
remembered Philip Nolan, but had heard different 
versions of his career. The author of this clever 
hoax — if hoax it maybe called — was Edward Everett 
Hale, a Unitarian clergyman of Boston, who pub- 
lished a collection of stories in 1868, under the fan- 
tastic title, //", Ves, and Perhaps^ indicating thereby 
that some of the tales were possible, some of them 
probable, and others migiit even be regarded as 
essentially true. A similar collection. His Level 
Best and Other Stories was published in 1873, and 
in the interval three volumes of a somewhat dif- 
ferent kind, the Inghajn Papers and Sybaris and 
Other Honies^ both in 1869, and Ten Times One Js 
Ten, in 187 1. The author shelters himself behind 
the imaginary figure of Captain Frederic Ingham, 
pastor of the Sandemanian Church at Naguadavick, 
and the same characters have a way of re-appearing 
in his successive volumes as old friends of the 
reader, which is pleasant at first, but in the end a 



Literature SI^■CE 1861. 259 

little tiresome. Mr. Hale is one of the most orig- 
inal and ingenious of American story writers. 
The old device of making wildly improbable in- 
ventions appear like fact by a realistic treatment 
of details — a device employed by Swift and 
Edgar Poe, and more lately by Jules Verne — 
became quite fresh and novel in his hands, and 
was managed with a humor all his own. Some of 
his best stories are My Double and How He Undid 
Me^ describing how a busy clergyman found an 
Irishman who looked so much like himself that he 
trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent him 
to do duty in his stead at public meetings, dinners, 
etc., thereby escaping bores and getting time for 
real work ; the Brick Moon, a story of a projectile* 
built and launched into space, to revolve in a 
fixed meridian about the earth and serve mariners 
as a mark of longitude ; the Rag Man and Rag 
Woman, a tale of an impoverished couple who 
made a competence by saving the pamphlets, ad- 
vertisements, wedding cards, etc., that came to 
them through the mail, and developing a paper 
business on that basis ; and the Skeleton in the 
Closet, which shows how the fate of the South- 
ern Confederacy was involved in the adventures 
of a certain hoop-skirt, ''built in the eclipse and 
rigged with curses dark." Mr. Hale's historical 
scholarship and his exact habit of mind have 
aided him in the art of giving vi'aisejublance to 
absurdities. He is known in philanthropy as well 
as in letters, and his tales have a cheerful, busy, 



26o American Literature, 

practical way with them in consonance with his 
motto, " Look up and not down, look forward 
and not back, look out and not in, and lend a 
hand." 

It is too soon to sum up the literary history of 
the last quarter of a century. The writers who 
have given it shape are still writing, and their 
work is therefore incomplete. But on the slight- 
est review of it two facts become manifest: first, 
that New England has lost its long monopoly ; 
and, secondly, that a marked feature of the period 
is the growth of realistic fiction. The electric 
tension of the atmosphere for thirty years preced- 
ing the civil war, the storm and stress of great 
public contests, and the intellectual stir produced 
by transcendentalism seem to have been more fa- 
vorable to poetry and literary idealism than pres- 
ent conditions are. At all events there are no new 
poets who rank with Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, 
and others of the elder generation, although George 
H. Boker, in Philadelphia, R. H. Stoddard and 
E. C. Stedman, in New York, and T. B. Aldrich, 
first in New York and afterward in Boston, have 
written creditable verse; not to speak of younger 
writers, whose work, however, for the most part, 
has been more distinguished by delicacy of execu- 
tion than by native impulse. Mention has been 
made of the establishment of Harper s Monthly 
Magazine^ which, under the conduct of its accom- 
plished editor, George W. Curtis, has provided the 
public with an abundance of good reading. The 



Literature Since i86i. 261 

old Putnam s Monthly, which ran from 1853 to 
1858, and had a strong corps of contributors, was 
revived in 1868, and continued by that name till 
1870, when it was succeeded by Scribners MojitJil}\ 
under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and 
this in 1881 by the Century^ an efficient rival of 
Harper s in circulation, in literary excellence, and 
in the beauty of its wood engraving, the American 
school of which art these two great periodicals 
have done much to develop and encourage. An- 
other New York monthly, the Galaxy^ ran from 
1866 to 1878, and was edited by Richard Grant 
White. During the present year a new Scrib- 
ners Magazine has also taken the field. The 
Atlantic^ in Boston, and Lippincotfs, in Philadel- 
phia, are no unworthy competitors with these for 
public favor. 

During the forties began a new era of national 
expansion, somewhat resembling that described in 
a former chapter, and, like that, bearing fruit 
eventually in literature. The cession of Florida 
to the United States in 1845, and the annexation of 
Texas in the same year, were followed by the pur- 
chase of California in 1847, and its admission as a 
State in 1850. In 1849 came the great rush to the 
California gold fields. San Francisco, at first a 
mere collection of tents and board shanties, with 
a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity 
into a great city; the wicked and wonderful city 
apostrophized by Bret Harte in his poem, San 
Francisco : 



262 American Literature. 

" Serene, indifferent of Fate, 
Thou sittest at the Western Gate ; 
Upon thy heights so lately won 
Still slant the banners of the sun. . . « 
I know thy cunning and thy greed, 
Thy hard, high lust and willful deed." 

The adventurers of all lands and races who flocked 
to the Pacific coast found there a motley state of 
society between civilization and savagery. There 
were the relics of the old Mexican occupation, the 
Spanish missions, with their Christianized Indians; 
the wild tribes of the plains — Apaches, Utes, and 
Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and washermen, all 
elements strange to the Atlantic seaboard and the 
States of the interior. The gold-hunters crossed, 
in stages or caravans, enormous prairies, alkaline 
deserts dotted with sage brush and seamed by 
deep canons, and passes through gigantic mount- 
ain ranges. On the coast itself nature was unfa- 
miliar : the climate was sub-tropical; fruits and 
vegetables grew to a mammoth size, corresponding 
to the enormous redwoods in the Mariposa groves 
and the prodigious scale of the scenery in the val- 
ley of the Yo Semite and the snow-capped peaks 
of the Sierras. At first there were few women, and 
the men led a wild, lawless existence in the mining 
camps. Hard upon the heels of the prospector 
followed the dram-shop, the gambling-hell, and the 
dance-hall. Every man carried his "Colt," and 
looked out for his own life and his ^' claim." 
Crime went unpunished or was taken in hand, 



Literature Since i86i. 263 

when it got too rampant, by vigilance committees. 
In the diggings, shaggy frontiersmen and "pikes" 
from Missouri mingled with the scum of eastern 
cities and with broken-down business men and 
young college graduates seeking their fortune. 
Surveyors and geologists came of necessity, specu- 
lators in mining stock and city lots set up tlieir 
offices in the towns; later came a sprinkling of 
school-teachers and ministers. Fortunes were 
made in one day and lost the next at poker or loo. 
To-day the lucky miner who had struck a good 
"lead " was drinking champagne out of pails and 
treating the town ; to-morrow he was " busted," 
and shouldered the pick for a new onslaught upon 
his luck. This strange, reckless life, was not with- 
out fascination, and highly picturesque and dra- 
matic elements were present in it. It was, as Bret 
Harte says, "an era replete with a certain heroic 
Greek poetry," and sooner or later it was sure to 
find its poet. During the war California remained 
loyal to the Union, but was too far from the seat 
of conflict to experience any serious disturbance, 
and went on independently developing its own re- 
sources and becoming daily more civilized. By 
1868 San Francisco had a literary magazine, the 
Ovei'land Monthly, w^hich ran until 1875. It had a 
decided local flavor, and the vignette on its title- 
page was a happily chosen emblem, representing a 
grizzly bear crossing a railway track. In an early 
number of the Overland was a story entitled the 
Luck of Roaring Camp, by Francis Bret Harte, a 



264 American Literature. 

native of Albany, N. Y., 1835, who had come to 
CaUfornia at the age of seventeen, in time to catch 
the unique aspects of the life of the Forty-niners, 
before their vagabond communities had settled 
down into the law-a^biding society of the present 
day. His first contribution was followed by other 
stories and sketches of a similar kind, such as the 
Outcasts of Poker Flat, Higgles, and Tennessee s 
Partner, and by verses, serious and humorous, of 
which last, Plain Language from Truthful James, 
better known as the Heathen Chinee, made an im- 
mediate hit, and carried its author's name into 
every corner of the English-speaking world. In 
187 1 he published a collection of his tales, another 
of his poems, and a volume of very clever parodies, 
Condensed Novels, which rank with Thackeray's 
JVovels by Eminent Hands. Bret Harte's California 
stories were vivid, highly-colored pictures of life in 
the mining camps and raw towns of the Pacific 
coast. The pathetic and the grotesque went hand 
in hand in them, and the author aimed to show 
how even in the desperate characters gathered to- 
gether there — the fortune hunters, gamblers, thieves, 
murderers, drunkards, and prostitutes — the latent 
nobility of human nature asserted itself in acts of 
heroism, magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and touching 
fidelity. The same men who cheated at cards and 
shot each another down with tipsy curses were 
capable on occasion of the most romantic gener- 
osity and the most delicate chivalry. Critics were 
not wanting who held that, in the matter of dialect 



Literature Since i86i. 265 

and manners and other details, the narrator was 
not true to the facts. This was a comparatively 
unimportant charge ; but a more serious question 
was the doubt whether his characters were essen- 
tially true to human nature, whether the wild soil 
of revenge and greed and dissolute living ever 
yields such flowers of devotion as blossom ia Ten- 
7iessees Partner and the Outcasts of Poker Flat. 
However this may be, there is no question as to 
Harte's power as a narrator. His short stories are 
skillfully constructed and effectively told. They 
never drag, and are never overladen with descrip- 
tion, reflection, or other lumber. 

In his poems in dialect we find the same variety 
of types and nationalities characteristic of the Pa- 
cific coast: the little Mexican maiden, Pachita, in 
the old mission garden; the wicked Bill Nye, who 
tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at euchre and 
to rob Injin Dick of his winning lottery ticket; 
the geological society on the Stanislaw who settle 
their scientific debates with chunks of old red 
sandstone and the skulls of mammoths; the un- 
lucky Mr. Dow, who finally strikes gold while dig- 
ging a well, and builds a house with a "coopilow;'| 
and Flynn, of Virginia, who saves his " pard's " 
life, at the sacrifice of his own, by holding up the 
timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are 
mostly in monologue, like Browning's dramatic 
lyrics, exclamatory and abrupt in styl(^ and with 
a good deal of indicated action, as in Jim, where 
a miner comes into a bar-room, looking for his old 



266 American Literature. 

chum, learns that he is dead, and is just turning 
away to hide his emotion, when he recognizes Jim 
in his informant: 

" Well, thar— Good-by— 
No more, sir — I — 

Eh? 
What's that you say ? — 
Why, dern it! — sho! — 
No? Yes! By Jo! 

Sold! 
Sold! Why, you limb; 
You ornery, 

Denied old 
Long-legged Jim! " 

Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did 
our newspaper poetry for a number of years abound 
in the properties of Californian life, such as gulches, 
placers, divides, etc., but writers further east ap- 
plied his method to other conditions. Of these 
by far the most successful was John Hay, a native 
of Indiana and private secretary to President Lin- 
coln, whose Little Breeches, Jim Bludso, and Mys- 
tery of Gilgal have rivaled Bret Harte's own verses 
in popularity. In the last-named piece the reader 
is given to feel that there is something rather 
cheerful and humorous in a bar-room fight which 
results in "the gals that winter, as a rule," going 
" alone to the singing school." In the two former 
we have ^roes of the Bret Harte type, the same 
combination of superficial wickedness with inher- 
ent loyalty and tenderness. The profane farmer 



Literature Since i86i. 267 

of the South-west, who "doesn't pan out on the 
prophets," and who had taught his Uttle son "' to 
chaw terbacker, just to keep his milk-teeth white," 
but who believes in God and the angels ever since 
the miraculous recovery of the same little son when 
lost on the prairie in a blizzard ; and the unsaintly 
and bigamistic captain of the Prairie Belle^ who 
died like a hero, holding the nozzle of his burning 
boat against the bank 

*' Till the last galoot's ashore." 

The manners and dialect of other classes and 
sections of the country have received abundant 
illustration of late years. Edward Eggleston's 
Hoosier Schoolmaster^ 1871, and his other novels 
are pictures of rural life in the early days of Indi- 
ana. Western Windows^ a volume of poems by 
John James Piatt, another native of Indiana, had 
an unmistakable local coloring. Charles G. Le- 
land, of Philadelphia, in his Hans Breitmann bal- 
lads, in dialect, gave a humorous presentation of 
the German-American element in the cities. By 
the death, in i88r, of Sidney Lanier, a Georgian 
by birth, the South lost a poet of rare promise, 
whose original genius was somewhat hampered by 
his hesitation between two arts of expression, mu- 
sic and verse, and by his effort to co-ordinate 
them. His Science of English Verse, 1880, was a 
most suggestive, though hardly convincing, state- 
ment of that theory of their relation which lie was 
working out in his practice. Some of his pieces, 



268 American Literature. 

like the Mocking Bird and the Song of the Chatta^ 
hoochie, are the most characteristically Southern 
poetry that has been written in America. Joel 
Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, in Negro 
dialect, are transcripts from the folk-lore of the 
plantations, while his collection of stories, At 
Teague Foteet's, together with Miss Murfree's In 
the Tennessee Mountains and her other books have 
made the Northern public familiar with the wild 
life of the " moonshiners," who distill illicit whis- 
key in the mountains of Georgia, North Carolina, 
and Tennessee. These tales are not only exciting 
in incident, but strong and fresh in their delinea- 
tions of character. Their descriptions of mountain 
scenery are also impressive, though, in the case of 
the last named writer, frequently too prolonged. 
George W. Cable's sketches of French Creole life 
in New Orleans attracted attention by their fresh- 
ness and quaintness when published in the maga- 
zines and re-issued in book form as Old Creole 
Days, in 1879. His first regular novel, the Gran- 
dissinies, 1880, was likewise a story of Creole life. 
It had the same winning qualities as his short 
stories and sketches, but was an advance upon 
them in dramatic force, especially in the intensely 
tragic and powerfully told episode of " Bras 
Coupe." Mr. Cable has continued his studies of 
Louisiana types and ways in his later books, but 
the Grandissimes still remains his master-piece. 
All in all, he is, thus far, the most important liter- 
ary figure of the New South, and the justness and 



Literature Since i86i. 269 

delicacy of his representations of life speak vol- 
umes for the sobering and refining agency of the 
civil war in the States whose " cause " was 'Most," 
but whose true interests gained even more by the 
loss than did the interests of the victorious 
North. 

The four writers last mentioned have all come 
to the front within the past eight or ten years, and, 
in accordance with the plan of this sketch, receive 
here a mere passing notice. It remains to close 
our review of the literary history of the period 
since the war with a somewhat more extended ac- 
count of the two favorite novelists whose work has 
done more than any thing else to shape the move- 
ment of recent fiction. These are Henry James, 
Jr., and William Dean Howells. Their writings, 
though dissimilar in some respects, are alike in 
this, that they are analytic in method and realistic 
in spirit. Cooper was a romancer pure and sim- 
ple; he wrote the romance of adventure and of 
external incident. Hawthorne went much deeper, 
and with a finer spiritual insight dealt with the real 
passions of the heart and with men's inner experi- 
ences. This he did with truth and power; but, al- 
though himself a keen observer of whatever passed 
before his eyes, he was not careful to secure a pho- 
tographic fidelity to the surface facts of speech, 
dress, manners, etc. Thus the talk of his charac- 
ters is book talk, and not the actual language of 
the parlor or the street, with its slang, its colloquial 
ease and the intonations and shadings of phrase 



270 American Literature. 

and pronunciation which mark different sections 
of the country and different grades of society. 
His attempts at dialect, for example, were of the 
slenderest kind. His art is ideal, and his romances 
certainly do not rank as novels of real life. But 
with the growth of a richer and more complicated 
society in America fiction has grown more social 
and more minute in its observation. It would not 
be fair to classify the novels of James and How- 
ells as the fiction of manners merely; they are 
also the fiction of character, but they aim to de- 
scribe people not only as they are, in their inmost 
natures, but also as they look and talk and dress. 
They try to express character through manners, 
whicli is the way in which it is most often ex- 
pressed in the daily existence of a conventional 
society. It is a principle of realism not to select 
exceptional persons or occurrences, but to take 
average men and women and their average expe- 
riences. The realists protest that the moving in- 
cident is not their trade, and that the stories have 
all been told. They want no plot and no hero. 
They will tell no rounded tale with a denouement^ 
in which all the parts are distributed, as in the 
fifth act of an old-fashioned comedy; but they will 
take a transcript from life and end when they get 
through, without informing the reader what be- 
comes of the characters. And they will try to 
interest this reader in " poor real life " with its 
" foolish face." Their acknowledged masters are 
Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenieff, and Anthony 



Literature Since i86i. 271 

Trollope, and they regard novels as studies in 
sociology, honest reports of the writer's impres- 
sions, which may not be without a certain scien- 
tific value even. 

Mr. James's peculiar province is the interna- 
tional novel ; a field which he created for himself, 
but which he has occupied in company with How- 
ells, Mrs. Burnett, and many others. He was born 
into the best traditions of New England culture, 
Jiis father being a resident of Cambridge, and a 
forcible writer on philosophical subjects, and his 
brother, William James, a professor in Harvard 
University. The novelist received most of his 
schooling in Europe, and has lived much abroad, 
with the result that he has become half denation- 
alized and has engrafted a cosmopolitan indiffer- 
ence upon his Yankee inheritance. This, indeed, 
has constituted his opportunity. A close observer 
and a conscientious student of the literary art, he 
has added to his intellectual equipment the advan- 
tage of a curious doubleness in his point of view. 
He looks at America with the eyes of a foreigner 
and at Europe with the eyes of an American. He 
has so far thrown himself out of relation with 
American life that he describes a Boston horse- 
car or a New York hotel table with a sort of 
amused wonder. His starting-point was in criti- 
cism, and he has always maintained the critical 
attitude. He took up story-writing in order to 
help himself, by practical experiment, in his 
chosen art of literary criticism, and his volume on 



272 American Literature. 

Fre?ich Poets and Novelists^ 1878, is by no means 
the least valuable of his books. His short stories 
in the magazines were collected into a volume in 
1875, with the title, A Passionate Pilgrim and 
Other Stories. One or two of these, as the Last of 
the Valerii and the Madonna of the Future^ suggest 
Hawthorne, a very unsympathetic study of whom 
James afterward contributed to the " English Men 
of Letters " series. But in the name-story of the 
collection he was already in the line of his future 
development. This is the story of a middle-aged 
invalid American, who comes to England in search 
of health, and finds, too late, in the mellow atmos- 
phere of the mother country, the repose and the 
congenial surroundings which he has all his life 
been longing for in his raw America. The pathos 
of his self-analysis and his confession of failure is 
subtly imagined. The impressions which he and 
his far-away English kinsfolk make on one an- 
other, their mutual attraction and repulsion, are 
described with that delicate perception of national 
differences which makes the humor and sometimes 
the tragedy of James's later books, like the Amer- 
ican^ Daiiy Miller^ the Europeans^ and A71 Interna- 
tional Episode. His first novel was Roderick Httd- 
son, 1876, not the most characteristic of his fictions, 
but perhaps the most powerful in its grasp of ele- 
mentary passion. The analytic method and the 
critical attitude have their dangers in imaginative 
literature. In proportion as this writer's faculty of 
minute observation and his realistic objectivity 



Literature Since i86r. 273 

have increased upon him, the uncomfortable cold- 
ness which is felt in his youthful work has become 
actually disagreeable, and his art — growinc^ constant- 
ly finer and surer in matters of detail — has seemed 
to dwell more and more in the region of mere 
manners and less in the higher realm of character 
and passion. In most of his writings the heart, 
somehow, is left out. We have seen that Irving, 
from his knowledge of England and America, and 
his long residence in both countries, became the 
mediator between the two great branches of the 
Anglo-Saxon race. This he did by the power of 
his sympathy with each. Henry James has like- 
wise interpreted the two nations to one another in 
a subtler but less genial fashion than Irving, and 
not through sympathy, but through contrast, by 
bringing into relief the opposing ideals of life and 
society which have developed under different in- 
stitutions. In his novel, the American^ 1S77, he 
has shown the actual misery which may result 
from the clashing of opposed social systems. In 
such clever sketches as Daisy Miller, 1879, the 
Pension Beaurepas, and ^ Bimdle of Letters, he has 
exhibited types of the American girl, the American 
business man, the aesthetic feebling from Boston, 
and the Europeanized or would-be denationalized 
American campaigners in the Old World, and has 
set forth the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, 
and misunderstandings which result from contra- 
dictory standards of conventional morality and 
behavior. In the Europeans, 1879, ^^^^ an Inter- 
im 



274 American Literature. 

national Episode^ 1878, he has reversed ihe process, 
bringing Old Word standards to the test of Amer- 
ican ideas by transferring his dramatis personcE to 
republican soil. The last-named of these illus- 
trates how slender a plot realism requires for its 
purposes. It is nothing more than the history of 
an English girl of good family who marries an 
American gentleman and undertakes to live in 
America, but finds herself so uncomfortable in 
strange social conditions that she returns to En- 
gland for life, while, contrariwise, the heroine's 
sister is so taken with the freedom of these very 
conditions that she elopes with another American 
and " goes West." James is a keen observer of the 
physiognomy of cities as well as of men, and his 
Portraits of Places^ 1884, is among the most de- 
lightful contributions to the literature of foreign 
travel. 

Mr. Howells's writings are not without "in- 
ternational " touches. In A Foregone Conclusion 
and the Lady of the Aroostook, and others of 
his novels, the contrasted points of view in 
American and European life are introduced, and 
especially those variations in feeling, custom, 
dialect, etc., which make the modern English- 
man and the modern American such objects of 
curiosity to each other, and which have been 
dwelt upon of late even unto satiety. But in 
general he finds his subjects at home, and if he 
does not know his own countrymen and country- 
women more intimately than Mr. James, at least 



Literature Since i86i. 275 

he loves them better. There is a warmer senti- 
ment in his fictions, too; his men are better fel- 
lows and his women are more lovable. Howells 
was born in Ohio. His early life was that of a 
western country editor. In i860 he published, 
jointly with his friend Piatt, a book of verse — 
Poems of Two Friends. In 1861 he was sent as 
consul to Venice, and the literary results of his 
sojourn there appeared in his sketches Venetian 
Life, 1865, and Italian /ou?-neys, 1S67. In 1871 
he became editor of the Atlantic MontJily, and in 
the same year published his Suburban Sketches. 
All of these early volumes showed a quick eye for 
the picturesque, an unusual power of description, 
and humor of the most delicate quality; but as yet 
there was little approach to narrative. Their 
Wedding Jouj'ney was a revelation to the public of 
the interest that may lie in an ordinary bridal trip 
across the State of New York, when a close and 
sympathetic observation is brought to bear upon 
the characteristics of American life as it appears 
at railway stations and hotels, on steam-boats and 
in the streets of very commonplace towns. A 
Chance Acquaintance, 1873, was Howells's first novel, 
though even yet the story was set against a back- 
ground of travel — pictures, a holiday trip on the 
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay ; and descriptions 
of Quebec and the Falls of Montmorenci, etc., 
rather predominated over the narrative. Thus, 
gradually and by a natural process, complete charac- 
ters and realistic novels, such as A Modern In- 



276 American Literature. 

stance, 1882, and Indian Summer, evolved them- 
selves from truthful sketches of places and persons 
seen by the way. 

The incompatibility existing between European 
and American views of life, which makes the 
comedy or the trcgedy of Henry James's interna- 
tional fictions, is replaced in Howells's novels by 
the repulsion between differing social grades in 
the same country. The adjustment of these sub- 
tle distinctions forms a part of the problem of life 
in all complicated societies. Thus in A Chance 
Acquaintance the heroine is a bright and pretty 
Western girl, who becomes engaged during a pleas- 
ure tour to an irreproachable but offensively priggish 
young gentleman from Boston, and the engage- 
ment is broken by her in consequence of an unin- 
tended slight — the betrayal on the hero's part of a 
shade of mortification when he and his betrothed 
are suddenly brought into the presence of some 
fashionable ladies belonging to his own monde. 
The little comedy, Out of the Question, deals with 
this same adjustment of social scales; and in many 
of Howells's other novels, such as Silas Lapham 
and the Lady of the Aj'oostook, one of the main 
motives may be described to be the contact of the 
man who eats with his fork witli the man who eats 
with his knife, and the shock tliereby ensuing. In 
Indian Summer the complications arise from the 
difference in age between the hero and heroine, 
and not from a diff'erence in station or social an- 
tecedents. In all of these fictions the misunder- 



Literature Since i86i. 277 

standings come from an incompatibility of manners 
rather than of character, and, if any thing were to 
be objected to the probability of the story, it is 
that the climax hinges on delicacies and subtleties 
which, in real life, when there is opportunity for 
explanations, are readily brushed aside. But in 
A Alodcrn Instance Howells touched the deeper 
springs of action. In this, his strongest work, the 
catastrophe is brought about, as in George Eliot's 
great novels, by the reaction of characters upon 
one another, and the story is realistic in a higher 
sense than any mere study of manners can be. 
His nearest approach to romance is in the Undis- 
covered Country^ 1880, which deals with the Spirit- 
ualists and the Shakers, and in its study of prob- 
lems that hover on the borders of the supernatural, 
in its out-of-the-way personages and adventures, 
and in a certain ideal poetic flavor about the 
whole book, has a strong resemblance to Haw- 
thorne, especially to Hawthorne in the Blithedale 
Romance, where he comes closer to common ground 
with other romancers. It is interesting to compare 
\}i\^Undiscovci'ed Country \N\\}i\ Henry James's Bosto- 
nians, the latest and one of the cleverest of his 
fictions, which is likewise a study of the clairvoy- 
ants, mediums, woman's rights' advocates, and all 
varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of 
"causes," for whom Boston has long been noto- 
rious. A most unlovely race of people they be- 
come under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James's cos- 
mopolitan eyes, which see more clearly the char- 



278 AxMERicAN Literature. 

latanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken fanaticism, 
morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous 
intensity, and vulgar or ridiculous outside pe- 
culiarities of the humanitarians, than the no- 
bility and moral enthusiasm which underlie the 
surface. 

Hovvells is almost the only successful American 
dramatist, and this in the field of parlor comedy- 
His little farces, the Elevator^ the Register^ the Par- 
lor Car, etc., have a lightness and grace, with an ex- 
quisitely absurd situation, which remind us more of 
the Comedies et Froverbes of Alfred de Musset, or the 
many agreeable dialogues and monologues of the 
French domestic stage, than of any work of English 
or American hands. His softly ironical yet affec- 
tionate treatment of feminine ways is especially 
admirable. In his numerous types of sweetly 
illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent woman- 
hood he has perpetuated with a nicer art than 
Dickens what Thackeray calls ''that great discov- 
ery," Mrs. Nickleby. 

1. Theodore Winthrop. Life in the Open Air. 
Cecil Dreeme. 

2. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Life in a 
Black Regiment. 

3. Poetry of the Civil War. Edited by Richard 
Grant White. New York : 1866. 

4. Charles Farrar Browne. Artemus Ward — 
His Book. Lecture on the Mormons. Artemus 
Ward in London. 



Literature Since i86i. 279 

5. Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The Jumping 
Frog. Roughing It. The Mississippi Pilot. 

6. Charles Godfrey Iceland. Hans Breitmann's 
Ballads. 

7. Edward Everett Hale. If, Yes, and Perhaps. 
His Level Best and Other Stories. 

8. Francis Bret Harte. Outcasts of Poker Flat 
and Other Stories. Condensed Novels. Poems 
in Dialect. 

9. Sidney Lanier. Nirvana. Resurrection. 
The Harlequin of Dreams. Song of the Chatta- 
hoochie. The Mocking Bird. The Stirrup-Cup. 
Tampa Robins. The Bee. The Revenge of Ha- 
mish. The Ship of Earth. The Marshes of Glynn. 
Sunrise. 

TO. Henry James, Jr. A Passionate Pilgrim. 
Roderick Hudson. Daisy Miller. Pension Beau- 
repas. A Bundle of Letters. An International 
Episode. The Bostonians. Portraits of Places. 

11. William Dean Howells. Their Wedding 
Journey. Suburban Sketches. A Chance Ac- 
quaintance. A Foregone Conclusion. The Un- 
discovered Country A Modern Instance. 

12. George W. Cable. Old Creole Days. Mad- 
am Delphine. The Grandissimes. 

13. Joel Chandler Harris. Uncle Remus. Min- 
go and Other wSketches. 

14. Charles Egbert Craddock (Miss Murfree). 
In the Tennessee Mountains. 



28o 



American Literature — Index. 



INDEX. 



An Index to the American Authors and Writings, and the Principal 
American Periodicals mentioned in this Volume. 



Abraham Lincoln, i88. 

Adams and Liberty, 74. 

Adams, J. Q., 92, 109. 

Adams, Samuel, 52-54. 

After-Dinner Poem, 177. 

After the Funeral, 187. 

Age of Reason, the, 64-66, 75. 

Ages, the, 201. 

Alcott, A. B., 135, 136. 

Aldrich T. B., 260. 

Algerine Captive, the, 79. 

Algic Researches, 171. 

Alhambra, the, 94. 

All Quiet Along the Potomac, 242. 

Alnwick Castle, 103. 

^sop, Richard, 68, 69. 

American, the, 272, 273. 

American Civil War, the, 241, 

American Conflict, the, 241. 

American Flag, the, 102. 

American Note-Rooks, 123, 149, 151, 

155, 168. 
American Scholar, the, 120, 135, 160. 
Ames, t'isher, 62, 63. 
Among My Books, 1S8. 
Anarchiad, the. 69. 
Annabel Lee, 217. 
Army Life in a Black Regiment, 245. 
Army of the Potomac, the, 241. 
Art of Book Making, the, 99. 
"Artemus Ward," 248, 251-56. 
Arthur Mervyn. 80. 
At Teague Poteet's, 268. 
Atlantic Monthly, the, 178,187,197- 

I.J9, 244, 245, 257, 261, 275, 
Atlantis. 222. 
Aiif Wiederschen, 187. 
Autobiography, Franklin's, 33, 46, 

48, 49. 
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 

the, 173, 179, 



Backwoodsman, the, 9T. 

Ballad of the Oysterman, 174. 

Bancroft, George, 161, 181, 190, 191. 

Barbara Frietcliie, 207. 

Barlow, Joel, 68-71. 

I'atile Hymn of the Republic, 242. 

Battle of the Kegs, 74. 

Battlefield, the, 203. 

Bay Fight, the, 243. 

Bay Psalm Book, the, 23. 

Bedouin Song, 226. 

Beecher, Lyman, 127, 231. 

Beecher, H. W., 231. 

Beers, Mrs. E. L.,' 242. 

Beleaguered City, the, 165, 169. 

Belfry of Bruges, the, 165, 167. 

Berkeley, Robert, 18. 

Biglow Papers, the, 182. 183, 185, 

186, 209. 248. 
Black Cat, the, 218. 
Black Fox of Salmon River, the, 206. 
Blair, Jas., 13. 
Blithedale Romance, the, 123, 154, 

227, 277. 
Bloody Tenet of Persecution, the, 25. 
Blue and the Gray, tiie, 243. 
Boker, G. H.,260. 
Bostonians, the, 277. 
Bracebridge Hall, 96, 98, 247. 
Bradford's Journal, 24, 28. 
Brahma, 136, 141. 
Brainard, j. G. C, 205, 206, 230. 
Brick Moon, the, 259. 
Bridal of Pennacook, the, 206, 209. 
Bridge, the, 167, 168. 
Broken Heart, tlie, 99. 
Brown, C. B., 79-82. 
Browne, C. F.. 250, 251. 
Brownell, H. H., 242-44.' 
Bryant, W. C., 86, 102, 163, 199-204. 
Buccaneer, the, 115, 



American Literature — Index. 



281 



Building of the Ship, the, 167. 
Bundle of Letters, A, 273. 
Burnett, Mrs. F. H., 271. 
Bushnell, Horace, 128. 
Busy-Body, the, 45, 66. 
Butler, W. A., 224. 
Byrd, Wm., 17. 

Cable, G. W., 268. 

Calhoun, J. C, 56, no, in. 

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, 161. 

Cape Cod, 144. 

Capture of Fugitive Slaves, 184. 

Cary, Alice, 228. 

Can', Phoebe, 228. 

Cask of Amontillado, the, 218. 

Cassandra South wick, 209. 

Cathedral, the, 189. 

Cecil Dreeme, 245. 

Century Magazine, the, 197,241,261. 

Chambered Nautilus, the, 176. 

Chance Acquaintance. A, 275, 276. 

Channing, W. E., iis-18, 120, 126, 

130. 138. 
Channing, W. E., Jr., 138, 156. 
Channing, W. H., 13S. 
Chapel of the Hermits, the, 208. 
Character of Milton, the, 117, 
Charleston, 243. 
Children of Adam, 233. 
Choate, Rufus, 114, 115. 
Christian Examiner, the, 117. 
Circular Letter, by Otis & Quincy,55. 
City in the Sea, the, 214. 
Clara Howard, 80. 
Clarke, J. F., 138. 
Clay, Henry, no, in. 
Clemens, S. L., 250, 255-57. 
Columbiad, the, 70, 71. 
Common Sense, 63. 
Condensed Novels, 264. 
Conduct of Life, the, 139. 
Confederate States of America, the, 

241. 
Conquest of Canaan, 72. too. 
Conquest of Granada, 94. 
Conquest of Mexico, 190. 
Conquest of Peru, 190. 
Conspiracy of Pontiac, the, 192. 
Constitution and the Union, the, 112. 
Constitution of the United States, 

the, 55, 59. 
Contentment, 109. 
Contrast, the, 79. 
Conversations on the Gospels, 131;. 
Conversations on Some of the Old 

Poets, 187. 
Cooke, J. E., 222. 



Cooper, J. F., 77, 91, 104-8, 114, 171, 

269. 
Coral Grove, the, 230. 
Cotton, John, 25, 32. 
Count Frontenac & New France, 193. 
Courtin', the, 185, 248. 
Courtship of Miles Standish, the, 30. 
Cow Chase, the, 73. 
Cranch, C. P., 123, 138. 
Crisis, the, 63. 
Croaker Papers, the, 103. 
Culprit Fay, the, 102. 
Curtis, G. W., 123, 260. 

Daisy Miller, 272, 273. 

Dana, C. A., 122, 138, 199. 

Dana, R. H., 86, ns. 

Danbury News Man, 74, 250. 

Dante, Longfellow's, 172. 

Davis, Jefferson, 241. 

Day of Doom, the, 40, 

Death of the Flowers, the, 201, 202. 

Declaration of Independence, the, 55. 

Deerslayer, the, 106, 108. 

Democratic Vistas, 236. 

Derby, G. H., 250. 

Descent into the Maelstrom, 219. 

Deserted Road, the, 228. 

Dial, the, 120, 127, 136. 138. 

Dialogue Between Franklin and the 
Gout, 48. 

Diamond Lens, the, 245. 

Discourse of the Plantation of Vir- 
ginia, A, II. 

Dolph Heyliger, 96. 

Domain of Arnheim, the, 219. 

Dorchester Giant, the. 173. 

Drake, J. R-, 102, 103, 115. 

Draper, J. W., 241. 

Dream Life, 231. 

Dresser, the Wound, 235. 

Drifting, 228. 

Driving Home the Cows, 242, 

Drum Paps, 236. 

Dutchman's Fireside, the, 102. 

Dwight, J. S., 123, 130, 138, 

Dwight, Theodore, 68, 69. 

Dwight, Timothy, 68, 72. 

Early Spring in Massachusetts, 144. 

Echo, the, 69. 

Echo Club, the, 226. 

Edgar Huntley, 80. 

Edith Linsey, 22^. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 41-44, 72, 126, 

128. 
Eggleston, Edward, 267. 
Elevator, the, 278. 



282 



American Literature — Index. 



Fliot, John, 23. 

Elsie Venner, 180. 

Emerson, R. W., 113, 120, 121, 125, 
147, 156, 160, 169, 208, 235. 

Endicott's Red Cross, 153. 

English Note Books, 155. 

English Traits, 134, 142. 

Ephemerae. 231. 

P'.pilogue to Cato, 76. 

Eternal Goodness, 208. 

Ethan Brand, 152. 

Evangeline, i6y, 170. 

Evening V\'ind, the, 201. 

Everett, Edward, 114, T15, 181. 

Europeans, the, 272, 273. 

Excelsior, 166. 

Excursions, 144. 

Expediency of the Federal Consti- 
tution. 59. 

Eyes and Ears, 231. 

E. Smith, 223. 

Fable for Critics, A, 137, 187, tBq. 
Facts in the Case of M 
the, 215. 



M. Valdemar, 



Fall of the House of Usher, the, 218. 

Familists' Hymn, the, 29. 

Fanshawe, 151. 

Farewell Address, Washington's, 60. 

Faust, I'aylor's, 226. 

P'ederalist, the, 60. 

Ferdinand and Isabella, i6r, 190. 

Final Judgment, the, 42- 

Finch, F. M., 243. 

Fire of Driftwood, the, 167. 

Fireside Travels, 161. 

Fitz Adam's Story, 185. 

Flint, Timothy, gi. 

Flood of Years, the, 203. 

Footpath, the, 187. 

Footsteps of Angels, 165. 

Foregone Conclusion, A, 274. 

Forest Hymn, 200. 

Fortune of the Republic, 139, 140. 

Foster, S. C 228, 229. 

France and England in North Amer- 
ica, 192. 

Franklin, Ben., 33, 44-49, 66. 

Freedom of the Will, 42. 

French Poets and Novelists, 272. 

Freneau, Philip, 76, 77. 

Fuller, Margaret, 121-23, 128, 130, 
135-38, 142, 156, 171- 

Galaxy Magazine, the, 261. 
Garrison,W. r>.,iio, 112, 193,205,229. 
Garrison of Cape Ann, the, 38. 
General History of Virginia, 15. 



Geography of the Mississippi Val- 
ley, 91. 
Georgia Spec, the, 79. 
Ghost Ball at Congress Hall,the,223. 
Ciive Me the Old 224. 
Godey's Lady's Book, 197, 210. 
Godfrey, Thos., 79. 
Gold Bug, the, 215. 
Golden Legend, the. 171. 
(iood News from Virginia, 19. 
Good Word for Winter, A, 188. 
Goodrich, S. G.. 88, 92, 151. 
Grandfather's Chair, 38. 
Grandissimes, the, 268. 
Greeley, Horace, 123, 225. 
Green River. 201. 
(jreene, A. G., 109. 
Greenfield Hill, 72. 
Guardian Angel, the, 180. 

Hail, Columbia ! 74. 

Hale, E. E., 160, 215, 257-60. 

Halleck, F. G., 103, 104, 115. 

Halpine, C. G.. 245. 

Hamilton. Alexander, 59-61, 63, 112. 

Hannah Thurston, 227. 

Hans Breitmann Ballads, 267. 

Hans Pfaail, 215. 

Harliinger, the, 122, 123. 

Harper's Monthly Magazine, 197, 

iqS, 260, 261. 
Harris, J. C, 268. 
Harte, F. B., 255, 261, 263-66. 
Hasty Pudding, 71. 
Haunted Palace, the, 217. 
Hawthorne, Julian, 154. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 7, 29, 38,70, 
123, 137, 149-156, jfB, 181, 227, 
240, 247, 248, 269, 272, 277. 
Hay, John, 266. 
Health, A, 109. 
Heathen Chinee, the, 264. 
Hedge, F. H., 123. 
Height of the Ridiculous, the, 173. 
Henry, Patrick, 52-54, 59. 
Hiawatha, 77, 170. 
Higginson, T. W., 95, 123, 137, 245. 
Hisl.evel Best. 258. 
History of the Dividing Line, 17. 
History of New England, Win- 

throp''s, 28-32. 
History of I lymouth Plantation, 

Bradford's. 28. 
History of the United Netherlands, 

191. 
History of the United States, Ban- 
croft's, 161, 191: Higginson's, 
95- 



American Literature — Index. 



283 



History of Vir2;inia, Berkeley's, 18 : 

Stub's, j8. 
Hoffman, C. F., 224. 
Holland, J. G., 261. 
Holmes, O. W., 109, i6o, 161, 172- 

181, 202, 245, 247, 248. 
Home, Sweet Home, 108. 
Homesick in Heaven, 176. 
Hooker, Thos., 32, 35, 128. 
Hoosier Schoolmaster, the, 267. 
Hopkins, Lemuel, 68, 6:). 
Hopkinson, Francis, 74. 
Hopkinson, Joseph, 74. 
Horse-Shoe Robinson, 221. 
House of the Seven Gables, the, 150, 

154- 
Howe, Mrs. J. W.. 242. 
Howells, W. D., 269-271, 274-78. 
Humphreys, David, 6i, 69. 
Hymn at the Completion of Concord 

IVIonument, 143. 
Hymn of the Moravian Nuns, 163. 
Hymn to the Night, 165. 
Hymn to the North Star, 200. 
Hyperion, 172. 

Ichabod, 207. 

If, Yes, and Perhaps, 258. 

Iliad, Hryant's, 204. 

Illustrious Providences, 34. 

In the Tennessee Mountains, 268. 

In the Twilight, 187. 

In War Time, 207. 

Independent, the, 231. 

Indian Bible, Eliot's, 23. 

Indian Burying Ground, the, 76, 77. 

Indian Student, the, 76. 

Indian Summer, 276. 

Ingham Papers,. 258. 

Inklings of Adventure, 223. 

Innocents Abroad, 2,5. 256. 

International Episode, An, 272, 273. 

Irving, Washington, 86, gi, 92, 93- 

lor, 201, 247, 248, 257 273. 
Israfel, 214. 
Italian Journeys, 275. 
Italian Note-Books, 155. 

James, Henry, 245, 269-74, 276, 277, 

Jane Talbot, 80. 

Jay, John, 60, 61. 

Jefferson, Thos., 14, 55-59,62. 

Jesuits in North America, the, 193. 

Jim, 265. 

Jim Bludso, 266. 

John Brown's Body, 73. 242. 

John Godfrey's Fortune, 227. 

John PhcEnix, 250. 



John Underbill, 29. 

Jonathan to John, 1S5. 

" Josh Billings," 255. 

Journey to the Land of Eden, A, 17. 

Judd, Sylvester, 189. 

Jumping Frog, the, 255. 

June, 201, 202. 

Justice and Expediency, 206. 

Kansas and Nebraska Bill, the, 195. 

Katie, 243. 

Kennedy, J. P., 221. 

Key, F. S., 75. 

Kidd, the Pirate, 96. 

King's Missive, the, 200. 

Knickerbocker Magazine, the, 96, 

loi, 151, 192, 210. 
Knickerbocker's History of New 

York, 86, 96, 97, 247. 

Lady of the Aroostook, the, 274, 276. 

Lanier, Sidney, 267. 

La Salle and the Discovery of the 

Great West, 193. 
Last Leaf, the, 109, 174. 
Last of the Mohicans, the, 106, 108. 
Last of the Valerii, the, 272. 
Latest Form of Infidelity, the, 128. 
Laus Deo, 207. 

Leatherstocking Tales, 77, 106, 107. 
Leaves of Grass, 232, 233, 236. 
Lecture on the Mormons, 252. 
Legend of Brittany, 182. 
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 96, 98. 
Legends of New England, 206. 
Legends of the Province House, 153. 
Leland, C. G., 267. 
Letter on Whitewashing, 74. 
Letters and Social Aims, 139. 
Letters from Under a Bridge, 223. 
Letters of a Traveler, 204. 
Liberator, the, 110, 193, 229. 
Life of Columbus, 94, 100. 
Life of Goldsmith, 100. 
Life of John of Barneveld, 192. 
Life of Washington, 100. 
Ligeia, 218. 

Light of Stars, the, 165. 
Lincoln, Abraham. 188, 245-47, 249. 
Lines on Leaving Europe, 223. 
Lippincott's Magazine, 261. 
Literary Recreations, 210. 
i iterati of New York, 211. 
Little Breeches, 265. 
Livingston, Wm., 66. 
Longfellow, H. W., 29, 77, 149, 160- 

172, 183, 198, 231. 
Lost Arts, 194. 



284 



American Literature — Index. 



Lost Cause, the, 241, 
Lowell, J. R., 124, 135. 137, 139, 160 
161,168, 181-189, 199,202,247,24^ 
Luck of Roaring Camp, the, 263, 
Lunatic's Skate, the, 223. 
Lyrics of a Day, 243. 

MacFingal, 67, 68, 74. 

Madonna of the Future, the, 272. 

Magnalia, Christi Americana, 20, 

33-36, 40. 
]Mahomet and his Successors, 100. 
Maine Woods, the, 144. 
" Major Jack Downing," 250. 
Man of the Crowd, the, 218. 
Man-of-War Bird, the, 236. 
Man Without a Country, the, 215, 

257- 
Marble Faun, the, 150, 152, 154, 155. 
Marco Bozzaris, 103. 
Margaret, 189. 
Mark Twain, 248, 255-57, 
Maryland, My Maryland, 242. 
Masque of the Gods, the, 225. 
Masque of the Red Death, 218. 
Mather, Cotton, 20, 23, 24, 26, 30, 

33-38, 40. 
Mather, Increase. 34. 
Maud Muller, 208. 
May Day, 139. 

Maypole of Merrymount, the, 29. 
Memoranda of the Civil War, 236. 
Memorial History of Boston, 209. 
Men Naturally God's Enemies, 42. 
Merry Mount, 190. 
Messenger, R. H., 224. 
Miggles, 264. 
" Miles O'Reilly," 245. 
Minister's Black Veil, the, 153. 
Minister's Wooing, the, 230. 
Mitchell, D. G.. 230, 231. 
Mocking Bird, the, 268. 
Modern Instance, A, 275, 277. 
Modern Learning, 74. 
Modest Request, A, 175. 
Money Diggers, the, 96. 
Montcalm and Wolfe, 193. 
Monterey, 224. 
Moore, C. C, 224. 
Moore, Frank, 241. 
Moral Argument Against Calvinism, 

the, 117. 
Morris, G. P., 223. 
Morton's Hope, 190. 
Mosses from an Old Manse, 149, 155. 
Motley, J. L., 160, 190-92. 
Mount Vernon, 70. 
" Mrs. Partingten," 250. 



MS. Found in a Bottle, 221. 

Murder of Lovejoy, the, ito. 

Murders in the RueMorgue, the, 215. 

Music Grinders, the, 174. 

My Aunt. 174. 

My Captain, 237. 

My Double and How He Undid Me, 

259- 
My Garden Acquaintance, 188. 
My I>ife is Like the Summer Rose, 

108. 
My Study Windows, 188. 
My Wife and I, 230. 
Mystery of Gilgal, the, 266. 
Mystery of Marie Roget, the, 215. 

Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, the, 

21Q. 
Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 

XT '5^- 

Nature, 120, 131. 134. 

Naval History of the United States, 

104. 
Nearer Home, 228. 
Negro Melodies, 228. 
New England Tragedies, 29. 
New England Two Centuries Ago, 

188. 
New System of English Grammar, 

A, 250. 
New York Evening Post, the, '^00, 

204. 
New York Tribune, the, 122, 136. 
Newell, R. H., 255. 
North American Review, the, 114, 

J 15, 151, 162, 187, 190, 200. 
Norton, Andrews, 128. 
Notes on Virginia, 58. 
Nothing to Wear, 224. 
Nux Postccenatica, 175. 
Nye, Bill, 255. 

O'Brien. F. J., 245. 

Observations on the Boston Port 
Bill, 55. 

Occulation of Orion, the, 167, 183. 

Ode at the Harvard Commemora- 
tion, 187. 

Ode for a Social Meeting, 175. 

Ode to Freedom, 184. 

Odj'ssej', Bryant's. 204. 

Old Clock on the Stairs, the, 167. 

Old Creole Days, 268. 

Old Grimes, 109. 

Old Ironsides, 173. 

Old Oaken Bucket, the, 108. 

Old Pennsylvania Farmer, the. 225. 

Old Rc'gime in Canada, the, 193. 



American Literature — Index. 



285 



Old Sergeant, the, 242. 
On a Certain Condescension in For- 
eigners, 185. 
One Hoss 5^hay, the, 176, 248. 
Oregon 'I'rail, the, 192. 
Ormond, 80, 8r. 
" Orpheus C. Kerr," 255. 
Orphic Sayings, 136. 
Osgood, Mrs. K. P., 242. 
Otis, James, 52-55. 
Our Master, 208. 
Our Old Home, 155. 
Out of the Question, 276. 
Outcasts of Poker Flat, the, 264, 265. 
Outre Mer, 163. 
Overland Monthly, the, 263. 
Over-Soul, the, 136. 

Paine, R. T., 75. 

Paine, Tom, 63, 66. 

Panorama, the, 207. 

Paper, 48. 

Parker, Theodore, 126, 127, 129, 130, 

138. 
•Parkman, Francis, 161, 190-93. 
Parlor Car, the, 278. 
Partisan, the, 222. 
Passionate Pilgrim, A, 272. 
Pathfinder, the, 106. 
Paulding, J. K., qi, 95, loi. 
Payne, J. H., 108. 
Pearl of Orrs Island, the, 230. 
Pencillinss by the Way, 222. 
Pension Beaurepas, the, 273. 
Percival, J. G., 230. 
Percy, Geo., 11. 
'• Peter Pailev," 88. 
" Petroleum V. Nasby,'' 255. 
Phenomena Qusedam Apocalyptica, 

. 39- 
Phillips, Wendell, t6o, 193, 194. 
Philosophic Solitude, 66. 
Philosophy of Composition, 214. 
Phcenixiana, 250. 
Piatt, J. J., 242, 267, 275. 
Pictures of Memory, 228. 
Pilot, the, 107. 

Pink and White Tyrannj% 230. 
Pinkney, E. C, 109. 
Pioneer, the, 181. 
Pioneers, the, qi, ic6. 
Pioneers of France in the New 

World, 193. 
Plain Language fromTruthful James 

264. 
Planting of the Apple-Tree, the, 203. 
Poe, E. A., 109, 138, 151, 181, 201, 

210, 212-221, 228, 240, 259. 



Poems of the Orient, 225. 

Poems of 'l\vo Friends, 275. 

Poems on Slavery. 168. 

Poet at the Breakfast Table, the, 179. 

Poetic Principle, the, 216. 

Poetry : A Metrical Lssay, 174. 

Poet's Hope, A, 138. 

Political Cjreen House, the, 69. 

Pollard, E. A, 241. 

Pons Maximus, 227. 

Poor Richard's Almanac, 48. 

Portraits of Places, 274. 

Prairie, the, 106. 

Prentice, G. D., 205. 250. 

Prescott, W. H., 161, 190, 192, 240. 

Present Crisis, the, 184. 

Pride of the Village, the, 79. 

Prince Deukalion, 225. 

Prince of Parthia, the, 79. 

Problem, the, 143. 

Professor at the Breakfast Table, 

the, 179. 
Progress to the Mines, A, 17, 
Prologue, the, 176. 
Prophecy of Samuel Sewall, the, 39. 
Prophet, the, 225. 
Purloined Letter, the, 215. 
Putnam's Monthly, 161, 260. 

Quaker Widow, the, 225. 
Quincy, Josiah, 52-55. 

Rag Man and Rag Woman, the, 259, 

Randall, J. R., 242. 

Randolph, John, 57. 

Raven, the, 214, 215. 217. 

Read, T. B., 227, 228. 

Reaper and the Flowers, the, 165. 

ReLellion Record, the, 241. 

Recollections of a Lifetime, 88, 92. 

Red Rover, the, 107. 

Register, the, 278. 

Remarks on Associations, 117. 

Remarks on National Literature, 

118, i3o._ 
Representative Men, 133, 139, 142. 
Resignation, 167. 
Reveries of a Bachelor, 230. 
Rhoecus, 182. 
Rhymes of Travel, 225. 
Riding to Vote, 242. 
Rights of the British Colonies, 55. 
Ripley, George, 122, 129, 130, 138, 

199. 
Rip Van Winkle, 96. 
Rip Van Winkle, M.D., 175. 
Rise and Fall of the Confederate 

States, 241. 



286 



American Literature— Index. 



Rise and Fall of the SlavePo\ver,24i. 
Rise of the Dutch Republic, 191. 
Rob of the Bo^vl, 221. 
Roderick Hudson, 272. 
Roughing It, 255, 256, 

Salmagundi, 04, loi, 203. 

Sandys, George, 16. 

San ^'rancisco, 261. 

Scarlet Letter, the, 29, 152-154. 

School Days, 20^. 

Schoolcraft, H. R., lyr. 

Science of English Verse, 267. 

Scribner's Monthly, 261. 

Scripture Poems, 222. 

Seaside and Fireside, 165, 167. 

Seaweed, 167, 169. 

Selling of Joseph, the, 39. 

September Gale, the, 174. 

Sewall, J. M.. 76. 

Sevvall, Samuel, 38, 39. 

Shakspere Ode, 115. 

Shaw, H. W., 255. 

Shepherd of is.ing Admetiis, the, 182. 

Sheridan's Ride, 223. 

Shillaber, B. P., 250. 

vSigourney, Mrs. L. H., 230. 

Silas Lapham, 276. 

Simms, \V. G.,22r. 

Simple Cobbler of Agawam, the. 2T. 

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 

God. 43. 
Skeleton in Armor, the, 166. 
Skeleton in the Closet, the, 259. 
Sketch Book, the, y,, 96, 98. 
Skipper Ireson's Ride, 208. 
Sleeper, the, 218. 
Smith, Elihu, 68. 
Smith, John, 9. 11, 15, 16. 
Smith, Seba, 250, 
Snow-Bound, 20S. 
Society and Solitude, 139. 
Song of the Chattahoochie, 268. 
Song for a Temperance Dinner, 175. 
Southern Literary Messenger, the, 

2TO, 212. 

Southern Passages and Pictures, 
222. 

Sparkling and Bright, 224, 

Specimens of Foreign Standard Lit- 
erature. 130. 

Specimen Days, 236. 

Sphinx, the, 177. 

Spragiie, Charles, 115. 

Spring, 223. 

Spy, the, 106. 

Squibob Papers, 250. 

Star Papers, 231, 



Star Spangled Banner, the, 75. 

Stedman, E. C , 263. 

Stephens, A. H., 241. 

Stith, William. iS. 

Stoddard. R. H., 260. 

Story of Kennett, the, 227. 

Stowe, Mrs. H. B., 229, 230. 

Strachey, Willia.ii, 9, 

Stuart, Moses, 127. 

Sumner, Charles, 160, 162, 168, 186, 

Supernaturalism in New England, 

210. 
Swallow Barn, 221. 
Sybaris and Other Homes, 25S. 

Tales of the Glauber Spa, 203. 

Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- 
besque, 2(8. 

Tales of a Traveler, 95. 

Tales of a Wayside Inn, 209. 

Tamerlane, 212. 

Tanfjlewood Tales, 155. 

Taylor, Bayard, 224-27. 

Telling the Bees, 20S 

Ten Times One is Ten, 258. 

Tennessee's Partner, -.^64, 265. 

Tent on the Beach, the, 209. 

Thanatopsis, 86, 102, 163, 200, '201, 
2 -.3. ' . 

The Boys, 175. 

Theology, Dwight's. 72. 

Their Wedding Journey, 275. 

Thirty Poems, 203. 

Thoreau, H. D., 121, 12 j, 13S, 142-. 
148, i=;6, 160, 235, 240. 

Timrod, Henry, 242, 243. 

To Helen, 214. 

To M from Abroad, 223. 

To One in Paradise, 217. 

To Seneca Lake, 2^,0. 

To a Waterfowl, 201. 

Tour on the Prairies, A, 91. 

Tramp Abroad, A, 255. 

Transcendentalist, the, 130, 132. 

Travels, Dwight's, 73. 

Treatise Concerning Reh"gious Affec- 
tions, 43. 

True Grandeur of Nations, the, 

True Relation, Smith's, is- 

True Repertory of the Wrack of Sir 

Thomas Gates, 9. 
Trumbull, John 67-69. 
Triumph of Infidelity, 72. 
Twice Told Tales, 151-53. 
Two Rivers, 146. 
Tyler, Royal, 79. 



American Literature — Index. 



287 



Ullalume, 217. 

Uncle Remus, 268. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 22g, 230. 

Under the Willows, i86. 

Undiscovered Country, the, 277. 

Unknown Dead, tlie, 243. 

Unseen Spirits, 223. 

Valley of Unrest, the, 214. 

Vanity Fair, 251. 

Vassall Morton, igo. 

Venetian Life, 275, 

Views Afoot, 225. 

Villa Franca, 187. 

Village Blacksmith, the, 166. 

Virginia Comedians, the, 222. 

Vision of Columbus, the, 70. 

Vision of Sir Launfal, the, 184. 

Visit from St. Nicholas, A, 224. 

Voices of F'reedom, 267. 

Voices of the Night, 163, 165. 

Voluntaries, 143. 

Von Kempelen's Discovery, 215. 

Walden, 144. 

Wants of Man, the, 109. 

War Lyrics, 243. 

Ward, Nathaniel, 21. 

Ware, Henry, 128. 

Washers of the Shroud, the, 187. 

Washington, George, 60, 61, 63. 

Washington as a Camp, 244. 

Washington Square, 245. 

Webster, Daniel, no, 111-114, 115, 

Webster's Spelling Book, 88. 

Week on the Concord and Merrimac 

Rivers, A, 144. 
Western Windows, 267. 
Westminster Abbej\ gg. 
Westover MSS., the, 17. 



Westward Ho \ gi. 

What Mr. Robinson Thinks, 183. 

Whistle, the, 48. 

VVhitaker, Alexander, ig. 

White R. G., 261. 

Whitman, Walt, 232-37. 

Whiitier, J. G., 2g, 3S, 39, 168, 181, 

204-10, 230, 236, 244. 
Wieland, 80, "82. 
Wigglesworth, Michael, 40. 
Wild Honeysuckle, the, 76. 
Wilde, R. H., 108. 
William Wilson, 218. 
Williams, Roger, 25. 
Willis, N. P., go, 202, 222, 223, 225, 

231. 
Wilson, Forceythe, 242. 
Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire, 

186. 
Winthrop, John. 10, 24. 26, 28-32. 
Winthrop, Theodore, 244. 
Witchcraft, i83. 
Witch's Daughter, the, 206. 
Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 

136. 
Wonder Book, 155. 
Wonders of the Invisible World, 24, 

38. 
Woods, Leonard, 127. 
Woods in Winter, 163. 
Woodman, Spare that Tree, 224. 
Woodvvorth, Samuel, 108. 
Woolman's Journal, 82-84. 
Wrath Upon the Wicked, 42. 
Wreck of the Hesperus, the, 166, 169. 

Yankee Doodle, 73. 
Yankee in Canada, 144. 
Year's Life, A, 181. 
Yemassee, the, 222. 



THE END. 



